Businesses that don’t want to commit to long-term contracts for cloud collaboration services should check out HiDrive from web-hosting company Ionos. You can choose between four plans, and all are available on affordable monthly contracts so you can cancel them with minimum notice.

Ionos doesn’t offer free trials but you can try it out for next to nothing, with a one-year HiDrive Business contract currently costing a piffling 50p per month for five users and 1TB of cloud storage. We wanted to see everything HiDrive has to offer so we tried out the Pro plan, which costs £20 per month, starts with 2TB of cloud storage for ten users, enables support for the SMB/CIFS, FTP/SFTP, Rsync, SCP and Git protocols, and rounds it off with data backup services for users’ personal devices.

The HiDrive admin portal is simple to use, and you create new users by sending email invitations. For greater security, you can globally enable two-factor authentication (2FA) and assign admin rights to selected users, although roles aren’t supported so they will have full access to all settings.

After creating their account, users can download the Windows or macOS desktop syncing app. This worked fine on our Windows 11 clients, and the latest version sees a redesigned interface with easier access to all features.

Users choose the cloud folders they want synchronized to their local mapped drive and how to respond when external storage devices are inserted. Along with encryption of data in flight and at rest in the HiDrive cloud servers, the Pro plan enables end-to-end encryption, although this is left in the hands of each user who can choose to apply this from the desktop app and manage their own keys.

Device backups are also controlled entirely by users. They can enable this for selected folders, schedule it to run regularly and recover data from the app or their own portal. A concern is that total cloud storage is not per user but shared among them all and, as admins have no control over device backups, they’ll need to monitor usage closely.

HiDrive doesn’t do file versioning, but all plans provide automatic backup of cloud data. Admins can run this as often as every four hours, retain data for up to a year, and users can access the backups from their portal and restore selected items to a cloud folder or download them as ZIP files.

Each user has a personal repository in their portal for creating folders and uploading files to them. They can choose to share selected items in this area with anyone, including external collaborators, by emailing a web link with optional password protection, read/write privileges and expiry dates.

Sharing files between team members is handled by a “Common” area in the web portal. Only account administrators are allowed to create new folders within this and determine which users have read or read/write access, after which they become accessible in their own portal.

No Outlook or Gmail plugins are provided so all sharing and file upload requests must be sent from the user portal, with the latter limiting maximum file sizes to 2GB. HiDrive doesn’t integrate with any third-party apps, but users can load popular files such as Word documents or Excel spreadsheets from their portal and edit them in a browser without needing the relevant app installed.

Small businesses that want simple cloud file-sharing services will find Ionos HiDrive Pro ticks a lot of boxes. App integrations and collaboration tools are minimal, but it’s easy to use and, although cloud storage is shared, it’s still comparatively good value.

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Epson’s WorkForce Pro WF-C5890DWF will appeal to small workgroups with big print demands who need to keep a close eye on running costs. This versatile multifunction A4 inkjet printer can churn out mono and color pages for only 1.4p and 6.3p respectively, while a monthly duty cycle of 5,000 pages means it can take a lot of print punishment.

The WF-C5890DWF offers plenty of features, combining print, copy, scan and fax functions with USB, gigabit wired or 802.11n wireless, Wi-Fi Direct and AirPrint connectivity. The color flatbed scanner provides a 50-page automatic document feeder (ADF), there’s an 80-page multipurpose feeder at the back and the standard 250-sheet tray can be augmented with up to three 500-sheet cassettes.

Slotting into a drawer under the paper tray, Epson’s ink packs offer plenty of choices with K available in 3,000 (L), 5,000 (XL) and 10,000 (XXL) page capacities while C, Y and M come in L and XL page volumes. There’s very little difference between them for overall running costs, but note that the “Initial” packs supplied with the printer are only good for around 300 pages.

Installation is swift – Epson’s utility discovered the printer on our network, downloaded the latest software, installed a desktop status monitor, ran an automatic firmware upgrade and offered to load a wealth of free utilities. The Scan 2 desktop software includes a TWAIN driver with plenty of network scan controls, Document Capture Pro manages personal scan jobs and saves them for fast one-click access, while Epson’s iOS and Android mobile apps provide remote print and scan tools.

You can keep an eye on consumables from the printer’s web console and register it with Epson’s Connect remote print service. This assigns a customizable email address to the printer so remote users can print documents by sending them as mail attachments.

Scanning and faxing to the cloud couldn’t be easier. After adding personal Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive and OneDrive accounts at the Connect portal, they’ll appear in the printer’s touchscreen menu. The panel presents more icons for copying documents and scanning them directly to computers, network folders, FTP and email servers, a local USB stick and Windows PCs using Web Services on Devices (WSD).

Performance depends on the selected resolution. A 25-page Word document printed at standard mode in precisely one minute but dropped to only 6.4ppm with the driver’s high mode selected. We also saw this with our 24-page color DTP document, which averaged 23ppm and 6.1ppm for each mode. The good news is that the standard setting is fine for text: print quality is sharp enough for general office use, with only fonts smaller than 12pt showing hints of dusting. Color quality is another winner, with graphics and photos looking sharp and detailed without any signs of banding in large single-color areas.

Using Document Capture Pro to scan a 20-page sheaf of bank statements to a PC as a searchable PDF returned speeds of 22ppm. Duplex scans take much longer, though, as the ADF has to flip each page to scan both sides, with a double-sided scan of the same test document averaging only 4.3ppm.

You won’t need a high resolution for document archiving as output quality at 200dpi is fine for these tasks, with Epson’s OCR services correctly converting every word on the statements down to 6pt fonts. The software provides plenty of scan management tools along with a good range of output formats, and each PC that has it installed appears in the printer’s touchscreen menu for quick scan selection.

Epson’s WorkForce Pro WF-C5890DWF ticks all the right boxes for busy workgroups with high print and scan demands. The starter ink packs are a bit stingy but ongoing running costs are low, it offers great output quality and packs in an impressive range of user-friendly scan services.

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