AeroFS is now free up to 30 users
aerofs.com
aerofs.com
> Like Dropbox, but behind your firewall. File Sync and Share for the enterprise. Free up to 30 users.
Boom. I immediately am fully educated about what this does. I wasn't forced to watch a 2 minute video with no sound at work, or to google the product - questioning about why it's popular[0].
This is how you write effective copy.
[0] Notable offenders are yeoman and dropbox itself - both of which, while widely-used products - are completely opaque in what they do from their initial text. "You already know what I do" isn't good enough for people who don't.
Like Dropbox, but behind your firewall.
For many people, that's a sufficient description to get the idea. If not, you have the second part:
File Sync and Share for the enterprise.
Not as descriptive as the first part if you know what Dropbox is, but if you don't it will at least let you know how to categorize the product and whether it's something you might remotely be interested in. Finally:
Free up to 30 users.
Now they've made sure the next most salient point is given, the next thing you would most likely want to know. Everything else is something you can dig a little deeper for, but for the most part you know whether this is something you want to pursue or not. I think it's brilliant.
Even still, "Like X for Y" is far better than "The product you'll love from the people you love".
It's at the complete opposite of the general trend of obscure generic headlines, like "Make your life better" or "Be more productive" or "Gain time and money", or the worst "Sign up for free" (yes, I've seen that as the main headline).
It just makes sense to not waste your visitors' time because they won't stay long enough to decipher your marketing gibberish.
If I'm evaluating several products, the one who makes it harder to get information is the first on the scrapheap, unless it clearly has a killer feature.
I'm kind of curious what the legality is of using a competitor's trademarked name/brand in your marketing or presentation?
dropbox.com:
> Your stuff, anywhere
If that was all you knew and saw about the company, would you have any idea what they do?
"Put your stuff in Dropbox and get to it from your computers, phones, or tablets. Edit docs, automatically add photos, and show off videos from anywhere."
What about this is unclear? It's on the front page..
Huh, and I reloaded and got different text:
"Dropbox is a safe, simple way to access your files on any device." - this time right above the download button.
Wonder if they're doing some testing...
It is, but companies are not entitled to me reading their entire landing page. There's a large amount of truth in the "you only have 5 seconds to hook a user".
You should always put your best copy as the first thing a user sees.
"Your stuff, anywhere" is both accurate and vague enough to be interesting.
Effective A/B testing should be per-user and not per-page-load.
This is most likely going to discourage startups and other small-but-growing companies from using AeroFS.
IT costs are booked to the project or if you are lucky to central licensing bucket which can aggregate users and obtain a discount. Either way that comes out of my project bucket which is already besieged by too many expenses.
If you have a current process, an incremental improvement to it might be a hard sell at $500/mo. And I can guarantee that at 1k users, the $15k/mo is going to be a far harder sell than 'use sharepoint/the public file share/e-mail, it works fine'.
Dropbox already proved this point.
Think of it this way.
If you've got 30 people, you're using this product. Then you add another person.
Now all of a sudden you've got 500$/month expenditures suddenly appearing. The sudden appearance is much more likely to push people to alternative routes than a gradual increase.
I'm saying that someone is much more likely to look around for alternatives to do something if an expanse suddenly pops up than if an expense gradually does.
Edit: But then I looked at syncthing's git repo and thought, nah!
At the moment I'm paying for SpiderOak, which does this but another open source alternative that's getting there is Syncany[0], which supports a variety of cloud providers through plugins, versions all files and encrypts data.
There's also git-annex but its plugins aren't always high quality and usability is... Challenging.
With 800GB of data, I can send it to:
- SpiderOak: $130/year (1c/GB)
- Google Drive: $10/month (1c/GB)
- Dropbox $10/month (1c/GB)
- OneDrive $7/month (1c/GB)
- Amazon S3 $24/month (3c/GB)
- Google Cloud Storage $16/$8/month (2c/GB standard or 1c/GB Nearline)
- Rsync.net $160/month (20c/GB)
And that's not even taking the backup providers into account.
I definitely see where rsync.net would shine for business users because it looks like you have great support but for a regular guy who wants to backup his few hundred GB of photos and sync some files it doesn't make much sense.
I'm in a company looking for an enterprise-grade solution for our 5,000+ users, but this quickly became a non-option when I saw the pricing.
I'd like to pitch in until the parent clarifies but they probably mean OneDrive and not OneDrive for Business. To anyone reading this, please stay away from OneDrive for Business. It is NOT OneDrive and you will regret using it.
Yeah it seems like a good idea but the value proposition confuses me. Granted I understand most enterprise software works like this but when you have to buy all of the resources to handle the files it sounds really expensive for just some light software.
If you value the data you are storing, do not use OwnCloud!
I'm considering a small OwnCloud install for myself[], freinds & family, so any info you can pass on would help evaluating that. Also, if you can recommend alternatives to look into, that would be nice. What do you now use instead?
[] Actually for my own backups I'll be sticking with my own set of rsync paths that have worked well for quite some time, but OwnCloud will be for sharing stuff and giving people an easy backup option to encourage them to actually have an off-device backup (it'll reduce the "I've deleted X can you get it back for me?" and "my laptop died with all my stuff on it, is there anything you can do?" requests I get!).
As someone who's trying to figure out this exact situation for one of our teams, I'm not going to try to pirate something and then try to maintain it. I want to be able to call someone and make them help me fix things. I want to know that I'm getting security updates on my appliance. If I wanted to do all that work myself then I would just build it myself from e.g. BitTorrent Sync.
Besides, the last thing you want as a corporation with data so sensitive you want to keep it in-house is to trust it to pirated, unsupported third-party software with no support and then have someone snitch on you and end up getting sued for some huge amount on top of that. Sure-fire way to get… well, fired.
And it doesn't have to be a whistle-blower. It can also come up while you are trying to get support for a problem with the software. In the log files or something your colleague didn't know he shouldn't say.
To put it bluntly, this is just very naive.
The financial and the resource costs of pursuing a licensing violation in court are prohibitive. Especially when it's all based on he-said evidence from a pissed off employee. When BSA/Microsoft do this, it's a publicity stunt with long-term effects, and because of that they have a budget for that. For smaller companies (read - everyone else), the only practical option is to shame violators into compliance.
Same goes with BitTorrent Sync - their current paid-for version 2 expressly prohibits business use. Sigh. Their beta versions also did for some time, despite the fact they solicited business' success stories. People were even crazy enough to link to their commercial web site, using BT Sync products as a fundamental part of their service, against BitTorrent's terms of service.
Specifically, when you see language like this used by us or other people, the idea is that someone would not be able to come onto your website and use the content or features of your website for the purpose of driving their own business. The main purpose of this is that any commercial benefit from your website should really belong to you.
They are of course free to come onto the website to learn more about and purchase the products and services, which they are then permitted to use under the applicable product license agreement or terms of service.
Hope that's helpful!
It is genuinely nice to see terms that are concise, even if on this occasion, I may have misunderstood. I have avoided quite a number of products and services not because I was forbidden to use them, but because of the ambiguity that large, badly-formed documents cause.
If your lawyers and my sense of reasoning can come to a compromise I am still curious about what AeroFS has to offer so will return!
Also the "Learn more about Team Server storage options" link on https://www.aerofs.com/features/flexible-storage/ is currently broken.
I've just been going back over my emails from about a year ago when we decided to stop using aerofs because of stability issues. It doesn't make for pretty reading.
The JDK packager is open source, you can check it our on our github:
I like almost everything about AeroFS, except that the OS X client is (or seems to be) written in Java and doesn't feel native. It's kind of sluggish.
We had to restart the client again and again to get it to sync. Eventually it gave up altogether.
At the time it took Aero customer support almost 2 weeks to respond. By that point we'd decided to migrate to dropbox.
That was a long time back so hopefully they've sorted out the issues now (with the client and lack of response with customer support). At the time it was fairly obvious to us that we couldn't use them for a key part of our business - it was just too risky.
If you ever decide to give us another shot feel free to ping me, I'd be happy to help you get up and running.
Any apps that do implement this feature likely do so by making the original file read-only and having the first app that opens the file work on a copy. However, I think Windows may have a mandatory file locking mechanism.