David Williams & Associates sells playground equipment to parks, and schools. Its products include: GameTime’s GTImpax Playground Surfacing, commercial park equipment, site amenities, site furnishings, spray ground water parks, bleachers, sports and athletic equipment.

David Williams & Associates serves customers in Ohio and Kentucky, and the customers have come to rely on the company as their exclusive playground representative and business partner.

The company adds additional value to its customers by providing consulting services, design, installation, and project supervision to architects, cities, parks and recreation managers, engineers, and school districts.

The company was founded 25-years ago, before PCs, and fax machines were widely used. As arcane as it may sound, the company’s internal processes were paper-based. With the evolution of technology, its digital assets have grown exponentially. Managing the storage of all the digital information that is created on a daily basis has been a challenge. And implementing a storage strategy that allows the team to work collaboratively has also proven to be a challenge.

As an example, one of the hurdles the IT department has had to overcome is the emailing of large files. Over time the files have become so big and cumbersome they rapidly chew up storage space on the mail server. The company needed to find a way to meet the needs of its field associates to send data while preserving space on its mail server.

With FileCloud by Tonido, the David Williams & Associates staff is now able to share links, large files, and folders with internal staff and clients who need instant access.

Additionally, the WebUI, CloudDrive desktop application and iOS App give field associates access to files they previously didn’t have. With a central storage repository and unified storage strategy, the David Williams & Associates IT staff now has an organized structure for storing data.

As part of its due diligence process David Williams & Associates evaluated:

• Samepage by Kerio, which had 2 drawbacks: no local storage, and an inability to share individual files/folders.
• DropBox didn’t have local storage option. DropBox was cost prohibitive for amount of data generated by the company, and the IT department had security concerns. The company was also concerned about DropBox because the company’s products had issues, which had been reported by industry media. (Compare Dropbox vs FileCloud and learn why FileCloud is the leader among self-hosted alternatives to Dropbox).
• Box had no local storage, and was cost prohibitive for the company’s amount of data.
• Alfresco seemed like a match, but the setup and install was difficult.
• Confluence was more page-based and less file-based, which was really what the company needed.

Finally, David Williams & Associates found ownCloud too complex to install, manage, and the price point for the supported platform was cost prohibitive for the company.

BENEFITS OF FILECLOUD

The key reasons David William & Associates selected FileCloud included: local and on-premises storage; fully functional free trial; active development; no modules or plugins needed for core functions; a price point that fit within the company’s budget; personal and friendly support; and response during the presale and post sale process.

• Secure Access for employees within the corporate network for data integrity;
• File Sync and Endpoint backup in one solution;
• Data backup ensuring protection of company intellectual content;
• Version control so that all documents and stored data is accurate and current;
• Keep control of data within the corporate cloud versus outsourced cloud data center management;
• File Cloud customers save over savings of over 70 percent against competitor solutions.