Sandstorm for Work is Ready
By Kenton Varda - 31 Aug 2016
Today, we’re announcing that Sandstorm for Work is no longer in beta. Companies large and small – ourselves included – have been getting work done using Sandstorm for months. It’s time for you to join us!
What is Sandstorm for Work?
Do you wish you could use web services like Google Apps, Slack, Trello, Dropbox, and others, but can’t for security, privacy, or compliance reasons? Frustrated by the setup and maintenance costs of most self-hosted solutions? Need to integrate with your corporate single-sign-on (LDAP, SAML, Active Directory) and enforce company-wide access control policies?
Sandstorm is a suite of web-based productivity software which you can deploy on your own servers with minimal effort. Any user can install the apps they need with a few clicks – like installing apps on your phone. Apps run inside secure sandboxes with single-sign-on and uniform fine-grained access control. And everything stays up-to-date automatically, so you can set it and forget it.
Sandstorm for Work is Sandstorm plus the ability to integrate with your corporate single-sign-on, priority support, and other features businesses need.
Pricing
During the beta period we listened to your feedback on pricing, and we’ve decided to make some changes:
- We’ve set a new list price of $10/user/month.
- For a limited time, we are offering an additional 50% off if you choose annual billing.
- Free trials now last 60 days.
Discounted and free keys
We only think you should be paying for Sandstorm if it is helping you make money. To that end:
- Non-profits with paid employees can receive Sandstorm for Work at half price: $5/user/month.
- Educational institutions supporting faculty and students pay $5/month for each faculty member and $1/month for each student.
- Volunteer groups can receive Sandstorm for Work completely free.
- Home users can also receive Sandstorm for Work for free; if you run an LDAP or SAML server for your own family, then we want your Sandstorm server to be able to take advantage of it.
- Bulk discounts are available for large organizations and resellers.
If any of these situations describe you, tell us about it and we’ll set you up.
Core productivity suite
Sandstorm now bundles our four most-popular apps. Every user can immediately edit documents with Etherpad, create task boards with Wekan, create a chat room with Rocket.Chat, and synchronize & secure their files with Davros.
On Sandstorm, these apps can integrate in ways that aren’t possible when they run stand-alone. For example:
- Activity, comments, and mentions are merged into a single notification stream, so it’s easy to keep track of what your teammates are working on across all apps at once.
- You can gather related data from across apps into collections to be shared as a unit.
- You can share data from any app directly and securely to a chat room in Rocket.Chat – click the button just to the left of the chat box. No need to generate nor copy/paste a secret link – and no need to worry about that link falling into the wrong hands.
- Sandstorm for Work’s priority support covers these apps in addition to Sandstorm itself. If you have a problem, just let us know and we’ll work with the upstream developers to get it fixed on your behalf.
Extended app library
There are currently 61 apps and growing available on Sandstorm, and you can easily make your own. Need to run surveys, create spreadsheets, make diagrams, take notes, typeset scholarly papers, host code, publish web pages, or run wikis? We have all that, and more.
Unprecedented security
Sandstorm is the only server platform that uses fine-grained containerization, which protects you against security bugs in apps, so you can safely let your users install the apps they need, relying on Sandstorm’s automatic exploit mitigation and network isolation to keep data safe.
Automatic updates
As always, once you’ve installed Sandstorm for Work, Sandstorm and apps will be kept up-to-date automatically, with no action needed on your part. Sandstorm is getting better every day, and your users will get those benefits without you lifting a finger.
Still open source
Sandstorm for Work is 100% open source software with a thriving community. That means it will never disappear or stop working. Read more in our original announcement.