I just use 365...OneDrive...for one-sharing of files to clients or even other external people I collaborate with on projects. Or via Teams...with clients that use Teams and are familiar with it.
The solution I'm looking for has to:
- Be able to be used for sensitive data (social security numbers, compensations, PHI, legal, etc.)
- Be able to be used by my clients to sending information to and receiving information from their clients.....without turning into a support headache for me.
- Be easy to use - otherwise my clients will hate it and not want to subject their clients to it
- Be robust and not overly expensive.
In the tiny end of the SMB market, not all of my clients are on M365 - most are, but not all. Most of the ones that are do not have BP. Some do, and it's a continual project to try and convince more to move up, but not everyone has. Many of them have EOP1 licenses....because they don't want to pay for more. Now this very well could be one of the advantages they would get if they did bump up to BP, but I don't think it's enough to justify the increase from $6/user/mo to $30/user/mo. for those folks who are already complaining about the $6. We got a new client just a couple of weeks ago that insisted on Business Premium without Teams because it saved $3/user/mo. "We'll never use that!". Man, I need to get some richer clients.
Most of my clients do not need this ability at all - but some do. Small law firms, small chiropractor offices, small actuarial firms, small accountants. Almost all of these would benefit from having this ability and many of them approached me for a solution.
After going through the process to set this up through M365 with one of those clients, they came back a few months later wanting a better answer. Too many problems and complaints from their clients, or they or their employees found the process too cumbersome. That's when I found Sharefile, which used to be their own company and offered a pretty turnkey solution to this problem at a reasonable price. Once we had that in place and working happily with one client, I recommended it to others. Then time passed, the company was purchased by Citrix, who raised prices initially, then later introduced the minimum license count for all customers. Now it has been sold again to "Progress". I don't know what that means for the future, but you can bet the price isn't going down. Many of the little 1 or 2 person firms who liked Sharefile originally stopped liking it altogether once the price went up.
Some industries have many choices for portal-based solutions (accountants, for example), but do you know what those solutions cost? It's a lot. The software companies all want to sell an entire practice management suite, not provide a simple solution for one job.
