OwnCloud

[CougTek]

Several people at the office have asked me if it would be possible to share stuff on a cloud. Some have started to test something like Redmine, but it's not implemented yet. Of course, we have several shared storage units that the employees can use, but they lack the discipline to properly class their documents where they should be and communicate with others when they move something, so our shares are a real clusterfuck.

I came accross that article this morning and OwnCloud stood out from the lot. Anyone here has configured it in the past? It certainly looks interesting.

 

[Mercutio]

I've used it for limited personal needs. I found that it was faster for me to use btsync most of the stuff I thought would not be OK in Google Drive.

 

[CougTek]

BTSync has no password. Syncthing is safer and open-sourced. Portable too.

But I think my users would prefer something like OwnCloud over bittorrent synchronisation. I just need to find a server with some storage to try it. It really desn't seem very complicated to install. I don't know about managing it though.

 

[timwhit]

What's wrong with rsync?

 

[CougTek]

The UI isn't user-friendly enough and I don't see how I would implement rsync to maintain a single share with some 50 users. Plus, I don't want 50 copies of the same files. I want a single, secured storage that's simple to use and access for my users.

There's also Sharepoint, but that's Microsoft only and that's high maintenance. I know, we already have some in use. It's easy to break, needs constant updates and those updates regularly break stuff. It's Hell.

 

[ddrueding]

When I was doing IT for Dolby Labs (~2000?) I realized that most of the local disk space issues were MP3s. My solution to this was to grab one of our decommissioned servers, fill it with old hard drives and create a share on it. The disk space issue was immediately solved. Within a couple months the MP3 repository had grown to ~300GB of audio carefully curated by ~20 engineers, and was starting to be upgraded to lossless (FLAC?) and used in testing and certification workflows.

This is when Ray Dolby called me into his office (no one went to his office this late in his career) and worked me over for a while. Apparently encouraging music piracy inside Dolby Labs would have gone poorly considering some of our clientele. My contract wasn't renewed 2 months later.

 

[Chewy509]

We tried it (an earlier version) in the office and was very impressed with it, we did however have a lot of work to do it get it integrated with AD. But reading the current documents (v8.2) the issues we had with AD integration are mostly solved now...

The only area which Sharepoint was better than OwnCloud was with how Office integrated with it (in regards to file locking during editing, etc)., but otherwise Sharepoint was a POS in comparison.

 

[CougTek]

Sharepoint was a POS in comparison.

Great minds think alike.

 

[mubs]

This is when Ray Dolby called me into his office

You've got a storied past, Dave! You should write a book some day.

 

[ddrueding]

Meh. The highlight reel is good, but there isn't enough there.