Enterprise Nextcloud Experiences?

🏷️ General
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Curious about what people’s experience is with Enterprise Nextcloud (not hosted) and support? Yes, we are in conversation with them (I am in the States) but since we are a rather large enterprise… there is just something non-standard here or the majority of their customers are European? Like i know my purchasing department wants a W8 (and that might be an argument I have to have) but the couple of times I have reached out to them across I am dealing with a distributed group of folks and I am not clear here.

But what is the business model and what has your experience been?

I found this, so my concerns about clarity might not be unwarranted. I do have an email and in contact, but was looking for community feedback as well.

And yes, we do use open source, and have paid for it in the past even internationally. So… just pinging for thoughts and feedback.

Thanks

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Hey @OneAverageJoe and welcome to the user-forum of NC.

As this forum is first and foremost for home/private/sbu users I bet it could take a while for you to get some answers here of ppl who really could answer from a professional point of view.

All I could tell you so far is the same that you read about. Plus: NC GmbH knows that they live from the quality of their support and word of mouth about it. I can’t tell you how much paying clients they have and where they reside. All I know here is that they are proud to have some really big players on their rooster (universities, federal offices, etc) - not only in Germany/Europe but on a worldwide scale. So they better have to be really good in supporting all those enterprises/companies.

All I can say about the qulity of their support: whenever one of the devs are visiting the forum (Which they do at times) problems are getting solved pretty quickly and in a friendly manner.

Again: Selling (great) support in all ways to their clients - 24/7/365 no problem (for logical reasons it can’t be the same guy).

And hey… NC is growing fastly. We even could see that on our forum. So somehow chances are that product and support is well… :slight_smile:

Hope that this feedback was kind of helpful for you.

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Thanks @JimmyKater … yeah I agree it is a useful product. No worries there.

Lol… and yeah, thought there might be a lack of practical answers since the paid users have another venue to go to, but we all live hopefully :slight_smile:

Sort of moving away from a competitor, but that competitor does seems to make it easier to give them money.

They have the right paper work though also in Europe, can handle a wire transfer or check, and a single point of contact–things a purchasing department and the accounting overlords like to have to (make sure I am not requesting a check to myself (at the least).

Also, it makes it a little harder to pinpoint how it works, explain it to management, and a poor experience is a reflection on me and my decision making. It is not a million dollar purchase, I get that. But the rules I operate under might be different that what another corp or uni operate under. In other places I would have been able to grab someone’s credit card and we would be good.

Doesn’t mean we wouldn’t use it as an open source unsupported install… trying not to! lol.

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Perhaps if you say more about what you are currently using we can offer more useful thoughts. :+1:

Enterprise support is for exactly this… so you will not be responsible when something important happens. In this case, definitely go for it!

fwiw, I enjoy helping with the forum and have found Nextcloud itself performing just fine over some years. I don’t encounter friends and family who are confused by it, especially once someone helps them set it up to “just work”. The secret sauce is having professionals handle changes for you, especially when your time is so valuable. There is a reason German and French governments warmly use Nextcloud. It scales up very well, especially on quality hardware beyond us home users. The benefit for you is keeping every in-house… the cloud you set up will be one you control entirely, allowing you to maintain top notch security procedures while making it simpler to do whatever-it-is-you-do with your private data.

The office integrations available are solid and you’ll hopefully find it a pain free experience to edit spreadsheets and such. My suggestion is to just setup a Nextcloud on Digital Ocean or Linode for $10 a month and just grant access to a shared folder for you and some coworkers… nothing critical, just try it casually for a few days. Or, ask Nextcloud if they could offer you this sort of demo, but with all the bells and whistles such as video coworking and office integration. I think you’ll find it works just fine, and it feels good to have infrastructure that you have full control over. Now add the enterprise support so it won’t be your head in maintaining it. :+1:

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Thanks @just Unfortunately, that’s part of the issue. If I could just put it up somewhere and set and forget I would, but the data we want to share with various groups is sorta sensitive so that model is not an option.

The competitor name isn’t as important as they seem better geared towards taking enterprise money from someone that has to jump through some hoops to generate a check or wire transfer and make the justification (see my first post, every enterprise has different rules, these are my company’s not mine)

Agree it would be nice to have someone help out, It does take some chops and troubleshooting to get up an running, but I did.

Jumping off that thought:
Implementation challenges and why support is desirable (not flaming, commenting)

The feature set shared and unique between GUI and occ console/cli and config.php can be a bit challenging unless you really dig to see what they do and what you want to do.

Locking down sharing in multiple places maybe could be easier (have to explore still if workflows will block WebDav clients… (and I have seen the discussions, they don’t hold up well when you would rather not make it easy to have copies of everything everywhere, bad actors zipping and downloading and logged as such right before their quit date aside).

the LDAP dropdown for folder to AD mapping could be better, doesn’t seem to show everything (missing groups, know there are threads out there), sorted by type and alpha would be nice, but the json cli remote file mapping to sftp shares works well enough after you figure it out that it is there.

The AD integration is somewhat confusing at first glance, but workable.

Wish there was more application hardening information, found info here in the forum and docs for that and to move the data dir, but occ in the web dir makes me nervous… that php/apache/sql hardening is common practices and referenced like that makes sense.

Skipping the cron.php and sticking to occ I think for traditional cron so others can lend a hand I think–TBD

They are all beasts to configure, but ongoing operational ease is important–this upgrades really cleanly so far compared to a couple of others things I have used.

Oh yeah, DUO integration challenge up next after I demo it internally.

Our use case?

We need non-collaborative software that allows us to add authentication and authorization and auditing to various shares/mapings to shared remote storage controlled by a vendor… what else is new? lol.

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The publicly known customers are mostly in Europe. Perhaps it’s better to give them a call. If your company has such requirements, other companies in the US might want to have the same, so it’s probably good for NC to sort this out.

Perhaps @Daphne or @jospoortvliet from Nextcloud GmbH can clarify on this from the company side.

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Ty. I am in contact with them (feels like these requirements may be new to those I am working with so there is some back and forth but time zone lag) and also wanted secondary or community feedback as well.

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Hey @OneAverageJoe ,
Welcome on the forum! I’m Daphne, Nextcloud’s support lead. We have customers in all regions of the world! We also have customers in the United States, and also partner providers and a reseller. We have W8 and we support wire transfer too.

The business model for our US market is similar to the European market, we sell enterprise subscriptions and my colleagues who provide the support are the same people for the US market as for the European market. If you have ideas on how we can make the entry for you or US customers in general easier we would love to know, perhaps we can facilitate it.

With the subscription we will help to get your instance up and running, we can also provide an infrastructure review etc.

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Thanks @Daphne … that paragraph somewhere on your web site. Maybe flesh it out a bit about the support portal and the mechanism. Mention the w-8ben-e (I would have told the sales guy, the site says you have one).

If there is a US reseller perhaps make that referral after initial contact as well rather than a local? I have no problem dealing with European sales folks, I’ve done the same in reverse and get up early, but the time zone thing might put others off. (a “For our US Customers” page kinda thing maybe). Make it easier to let us give you money for service.

The W8 for larger enterprises will be important (I sent an example yesterday and it was finally found and sent to me this morning local time). That was where this nearly died. It was a little tough getting there–important for the front-line to be aware of it when dealing with US customers.

Almost a deal killer.

I still have internal hoops to jump through, so I was about to drop that thread and was thinking pure open source community style use and support. And who wants that?

ty.

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Thank you so much @OneAverageJoe , that’s very good feedback. Thanks!

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