Got off the phone moments ago with Rahul from Egnyte Support. We're a small company - about 35 people local and about 10-15 more world-wide. We have a ReadyNAS Pro 2 as our NAS device with Egnyte on it - a modest NAS, but it's all we need for now.
I was having some trouble mapping the NAS to one of my users' computers as part of our early testing. As Rahul told me, it's because all local users (who would normally connect to the drive by mapping it to their computer) must be registered in Egnyte as Power Users. What does this mean? It means we're getting charged by Egnyte to access our data via an interface and system that was not developed by them nor is maintained by them. It does not add any burden to their software or responsibility, but they want to charge us further for each user that opens up Windows and types in \\Egnyte-NAS into their Windows mapped drive. It's asinine.
The OLC concept is brilliant, especially for small offices that don't have much IT background but are geographically diverse. However, amongst all the other problems and work-arounds I've encountered in Egnyte, I just don't think it's worth it for us.
Can anyone confirm that I'm not off my rocker here and that either a)this is indeed the only way to give secure access to our users (No, Rahul - I'm NOT giving Administrative access to all our users) or b) that this is as ridiculous as I think it is?
Yea that will drive you nuts! If you build a forest from Shared and then grant permissions you can work around giving all users admin access to each other. We started off having each person use the "Private" folders but then you can't collaborate with others when needed!!!! So now i've moved everyone to Shared and divided them up into groups by office. From there I can give permissions but now you have to train your users to only put info in the Shared path instead of the readily accessed private/"user" folder.
Egnyte Power Users are there for permission and authentication control. This allows unique security and privacy for each user. If this isn't crucial for your business, you can technically let multiple employees share one Power User login information, in which you won't have to purchase new user licenses. The downside to this approach is that groups of employees will be able to see, access, edit all the same files belonging to their shared folder (since it's the same user login).
Also to clear things up, making employees Power Users does not mean you're giving them admin rights. You, as the admin, can control all permission access rights of any folders. Power Users just enables employees to access their files from the ReadyNAS, web browser, mapped drive, FTP, desktop sync and mobile apps.
I'm aware that Power Users != Admins. However, it seemed like Rahul was suggesting to me that I could make our users Domain admins as that level of user CAN access the NAS and make changes to the files. This is, for hopefully obvious reasons, a completely ludicrous idea.
The suggestion that we create a 'generic' Power User account is a work-around of course, but for the long-term not at all a viable one. Especially if security is a concern (which it really should always be.) I feel like this is IT Management 101: don't make group login's with blanket security permissions. What Egnyte REALLY should be doing is allowing Standard Users (or perhaps even making a special tier) the rights to access the NAS if they are local. They don't need any other special remote access rights, and if they do - well, then paying to turn them into a Power User is justifiable.
Take our company, for example. We've got 10-15 people right now who would need to be Power Users - they're located around the world. They collaborate on projects with approximately 30 people who work within the office, across all 4 of our company groups. For simplicity's sake, lets say those 30 people ONLY access the NAS device - they will not need any remote access (while this may not be strictly true, it works from the standpoint that if we want them to have remote access, we'll gladly turn them into remote users and therefore pay for it.) Right now, paying for those 15 people to be Power Users is justifiable. Paying for 45 people to be Power Users will cost us, and we'd not really reap any benefit. There'd be absolutely NO value added from those 30 accounts - but it would cost us at LEAST an additional $150 a month ($1800 a year), really for no reason.
i agree with some of willc's points, but at what point can they keep "tier"ing users? like most saas platforms there are usually several tiers of packages, the higher the tier, the more features, in this case it's the privacy, security, and access tools. it's not really feasible for them to create separate tiers for each use case, at some point they have to make the cutoff and say okay this tier should get these features and it's up to the customer to use them. i mean they gotta draw the line somewhere, they are in the business of making money after all :wink:
I left feedback regarding this topic on the Official Egnyte Forums - and they've now deleted it. My language was not that different from here - certainly nothing disrespectful or rude to an individual or even the company. The feedback was certainly negative and critical and asking for an answer - one that was not given.
