Filr can be hosted by hosting partners as of today.
We want to hear from you on the interest and inputs on what would you want to see us doing in Filr to make Filr more multi tenant friendly.
So, if you are already hosting Filr OR interested in hosting Filr in their data center for your employees or customers: please vote on this and let know your inputs.
by: Devadas K. | over a year ago | Other
Comments
A performance dashboard showing both Admin and the Customer how the system ins performing and how much resource has been used, e.g. bandwidth would be useful.
The obvious question (to me) here is what a hosted Filr solution would bring to the table that we cannot achieve with competing solutions; if it's just another hosted file sharing service there are a bunch of [may be even better today] solutions out there.
The number one difference between a hosted vs an install for a specific customer is multi tenancy. So, Filr from a technical perspective would need to be able to
-Break up the system in functional blocks (fe leverage docker containers, NoSQL DB etc as a framework) which can be expanded on demand. High availability is key; zero downtime for maintenance and upgrades
-Scale out in the front end servers easily
-Scale out in indexing, have indexing services per domain
-Per domain branding
-Cross domain sharing abilities; a user could be member of multiple domains. Ability to sync Filr Clients with multiple domains.
-Authentication pooling and an ability to connect to existing user source. Think about how that would work for existing eDirectory/OES systems without the need for seperate NetIQ solutions.
-Backup, (partial) restore and disaster recovery capabilities per domain and system level
-System and domain level reporting/dashboards/admin tools for statistics, mgmnt and payments stuff.
-Are those customer file systems part of the hosted solution (fe as part of a hosted VDI solution the customers work with) or are they in their own (local) DC. How do we connect to and inform the system of file changes in such situations. Assuming here this is what we still want, since imo this is the key differentiation of Filr vs the competition. Are we going to cache or stage files with a kind of Branche Cache solution in between. At least that would fit a Archive and Versioning scenario. Would need a good file conflict framework. The Branche Cache idea is not that bad as it could be seen as a Filr Parent and Child solution where an onsite Filr takes part (domain) in a hosted (ther Parent) Filr System. This way you could have separate A/V policies in these P/C domains.
Some good points above.
Certainly the branding is key - potentially by email address/domain, potentally by host headers.
Role-Based Administration - each customer should have their own admin portal, but that should also be broken down into roles for example, creating/modifying net folder servers/net folders could be separate from branding.
As above, separate indexes per customer.. potentially very important considering GDPR. Data 'leakage' is not an option.
I hadn't considered a branch-cache scenario - that would have it working in a similar way to Citrix Sharefile, and allow us to provide access to customer's data on their own premises, but allow us to host the Filr back-end?
Not strictly a multi-tenancy issue, but I have brought it up before - file conflict resolution and colaborative working. We've lost customers to other solutions based upon the current limitations.
Edit in-place - having this working would reap rewards as far as a hosted solution goes.. something that doesn't require java browser support, or asks you to authenticate each time a doc is edited.
Controversial in this forum, but Windows file-server support is a priority for us. We use Windows file servers exclusively, as do our customers.
As above - non-disruiptive updates.. we cannot have Filr go offline for updates when in a hosted environment.
2FA support outside of the Micro Focus solution.. most service providers will likely already have something in place.
I would suggest a private, validated service-provider-only forum on the main forum site be created for this subject, as there maybe items to discuss that SPs would prefer to keep to a small community..
Thanks both.
We plan to work on this in Filr's next release (version 3.3)
Thanks for all your inputs and interests on this!
This is now available as part of Filr 3.3 (released today).
Marking this idea as completed.