Jerry Huang

We are hearing more and more partners talking about SharePoint replacement. As a collaboration solution, the most complaint SharePoint got was in two areas. The first is usability. SharePoint is not that easy to use with all the check-in, check-out stuff. Second is that SharePoint takes a lot of time and resource to setup and maintain. As we summarize what we have heard from our partners, it is about ease of use; either it be ease of use for the end user or ease of use for the administrator and SharePoint currently isn’t quite easy to use and that is the pain point for a replacement.

SharePoint is a very successful product. However, it is disrupted by the cloud storage movement and the mobile trend.  SharePoint was designed for Local Area Network, with Web Browser as the primary user interface. Nowadays, we are seeing more and more online collaboration solutions that enables collaboration over Windows PC, Mac, iPhone and Android device, and over the Internet. Customers are looking for that kind of usability, combined together with on-premise data storage and file sharing.

Gladinet Cloud Enterprise provide the kind of collaboration solution, that focused on end user experiences and end user device support. It is a collaboration solution that bridge the gap between an online collaboration solution and on-premise data storage.

1. Ease of Use – for End User

Gladinet Cloud Enterprise brings multi-device access to the collaboration. From the Windows PC, it offers a drive letter integration. From the Mac, it offers a Mac Finder Volume integration. From iOS and Android devices, it offers native applications.

2. Ease of Use – for Administrator

Gladinet Cloud Enterprise is built on top of Microsoft Web Platform, IIS/ASP.NET/.NET Framework/SQL Server (Express). With a Windows 2008 server, it is very straight forward to setup Gladinet Cloud Enterprise.

The preparation of Microsoft Web Platform is very easy with the Web Platform Installer. The Gladinet Cloud Enterprise is a standard Windows Installer (MSI) package. The installation time is about 5-10 minutes.

3. Flexible Deployment

There are many ways you can deploy Gladinet Cloud Enterprise. You can deploy it as private on-premise, connecting to your file server as the backend storage.

You can also install it as virtual private such as on an EC2 machine inside Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)

It is also very flexible to connect to your own storage service, let it be your own file server or your own private cloud storage services (such as OpenStack Swift) or your own public cloud storage accounts.

4. Next Step

Go to www.gladinet.com/cloudenterprise/ to check it out!