Merrill Datasite has been around for quite some time now dating all the way back to 1967. It is well suited for large enterprises working on large and complex deals their prices certainly reflect that. The data room will work best if combined with their content management service, which is important to keep in mind since it would further increase the price.
Merrill Datasite Review
Even though Merrill has an extensive history,
they have yet to adopt one of the standard customer service practices: offer a
free trial period. Even though the prices they charge may be worth it, it hard
for the customers to know this before they buy it. Therefore Merrill is asking
customers to take a giant leap of faith and take them at their word, but given
the amount of money that is involved, this is a big risk to take. It is also an
unnecessary risk simple pretty much all other data rooms offer a free trial
period thus allowing you to input your own data and play around inside the data
room to get a feel for it. This is really the only way to find out if a data
room is right for you.
It seems that customization does not exist inside the Merrill Datasite. There is no custom domain, active directory integration, single sign-on integration and many other customization features that you will find on some of the other data rooms out there. Also, you will not be able to integrate your CRM with the data room since there is no API integration available. This is really inconvenient and will result in a lot of extra work.
The security features are fairly standard. You
will be able to find features such as watermarks, two-factor authentication,
and data encryption. However, you will not be able to restrict access to the
data room based on IP address. This means that participants will be able to
access the data room from pretty much wherever they want and the security
features on external computers may not defend against viruses and the latest
cyber threats.
It seems to be missing the cutting edge features that you will be able to find in other data rooms. This includes secure spreadsheet viewing, which allows you to upload an Excel spreadsheet into the data room, but restrict access to the formulas that were involved during the calculations. Also, there is nothing to defend the documents against camera based attacks. Some data rooms offer “Fence View” which serves as a physical barrier between the document and the user. Corporate espionage is more of a threat to your documents than hackers and viruses and it does not appear that Merrill does enough to combat this threat, even with the above average prices.
All in all, it is not worth it to overpay just for the brand. You will be able to find comparable at a lesser price and you will not have to guess since you will be able to try out the data room before you buy it.
