It's time to start planning for the move from Alfresco Cloud to an alternative solution. And Loftux has just that, Sharebox.
So what will be the main differences between Sharebox and my.alfresco.com?
- Sharebox operates without user accounts. This means you can share access to folder content to an unlimited number of users. And there is no hassle dealing accounts such as a forgotten password.
- Sharebox does not create replicas, i.e. Sync. There is no risk of content getting out of sync, or that it is locked in one location. Content is instead streamed directly to/from the repository in a secure way.
- Sharebox lets you easily set limits to the share, for example, time-limited sharing or restricting uploads.
- Sharebox has a simple dedicated external client. It will not be the full collaboration client, but for external users that you can't easily train, simpler is better. A user can still download, upload, versioning and preview, the main tasks for an external collaborator.
Getting Sharebox up and running is relatively easy, you just have to install an amp module for Alfresco Repository and on for Alfresco Share. Then setup the Sharebox external client, that currently ships as a prepacked war file, so that is available externally. There is no migration needed from the Alfresco Cloud, you would just have to Share the folder to external users that contains the content you want to collaborate on. That's it.
We didn't allow versioning of files by external users in older versions of Sharebox. The reason was simple, the user sharing content needs to stay in control, the intention is to share a specific revision of a file, and not having external users alter that. But classic collaboration tools require that you allow for creating new versions. That is why we introduced versioning in the latest version, but only after lots of planning. So now you can allow versioning of files that the user self-uploaded, or you can allow versioning of any file shared. And of course, you can keep the old behaviour of not allowing versioning, or not allow uploads at all. So old "stay in control" is still supported, while extending features.
Security has also been even more enhanced. In the backend, but also noticeable for end users, where they can "leave session", that is comparable to logout, and the token will be expired. And for highly sensitive content, the sharing user can even force an auto-expiring token, that once used will only be active for that time-limited session.
Read more about Sharebox. Or you can Contact us.