New Educational Pricing gives Schools and Researchers Fast, Easy, Secure - and Now More Affordable - Way to Share Files

LEXINGTON, MA, July 19, 2012 (Press-News.org) ownCloud Inc., the commercial entity behind the popular open source file sync and share project, today announced a special program to get colleges and universities, public and private primary and secondary schools as well as research institutes - sharing and synching data, quickly and cost effectively.

With more than 500,000 users world-wide, ownCloud offers the ease-of-use of Dropbox with more flexibility and security. ownCloud users can run their own file sync and share services on their own hardware and storage, use popular public hosting and storage offerings, or both. ownCloud seamlessly integrates into a school's existing security and rights-management protocols, allowing IT managers to set security parameters while giving end users an easy-to-use tool.

"As so much educational material goes online, schools and universities have been looking for a secure way to share this material and still be easy to use for the students and faculty," said Holger Dyroff, vice president, Sales and Marketing, ownCloud. "This program not only gives them an aggressive price point, but enables them to set whatever security protocols they want to secure the data."

"Sharing and syncing files while maintaining existing internal and governmental policies has been an issue for the colleges and universities for some time," said Chris Andre, CTO, Overt Software Solutions Ltd. "ownCloud allows very convenient access - across devices - and enables sharing and collaborating between users. Due to the open source nature of ownCloud we have been able to enhance our services to even cover authentication using Shibboleth."

ownCloud - built through active community support - has innovative features like file versioning, - which actively saves files, allowing users to "rollback" to previous versions, and an API that gives developers an easy, stable and supported way to develop applications on top of ownCloud capabilities. ownCloud also enables the usage of existing file servers and home directories.

Availability and Pricing

ownCloud School Edition, targeted for schools starts at $1,250 per year for up to 350 users and $1,750 for up to 500 users. ownCloud Education Edition, targeted for universities and school systems 500 to several hundred thousand users starts at $5,000 per year for up to 500 users and 2 ownCloud instances.

Both editions are immediately available and can be purchased through the ownCloud partner network (www.owncloud.com/partner) or directly from ownCloud. For more information about the ownCloud Education Program, go to http://www.owncloud.com/education.


About ownCloud Community

ownCloud began at a KDE community event in 2010, aiming to bring greater flexibility, access and security to data in the cloud. ownCloud enables universal access to files through the widely implemented WebDAV standard, providing a platform to easily view and sync contacts, calendars and bookmarks across devices while supporting sharing, viewing and editing via the web interface. Installation has minimal server requirements, doesn't need special permissions and is quick. ownCloud is extendable via a simple, powerful API for applications. For more information, please visit: http://www.owncloud.org.

About ownCloud Inc.

Based on the popular ownCloud open source community project, ownCloud Inc. was founded in 2011 to bring greater flexibility, access and security to unstructured data in enterprises. Company headquarters are in Boston, with European headquarters in Nuremberg, Germany. For more information, visit: http://www.owncloud.com.