[ale] Question: Transparent document sharing over the Internet

[Dow Hurst]

I looked at oeone.net and thought they were pretty cool.  You can have a 
local drive, that documents are saved to, that is the remote network 
drive.  Uploading thru a modem connection at 28K is going to suck big 
time so your users better be connecting via local DSL or wifi.  However, 
if the team, local and remote, were trained to use WebDav type network 
drives then you would have a central repository.  I looked at the 
iFolder from Novell and that is a pretty decent solution too.  Novell is 
layering its products on Linux and Apache with support so that isn't bad 
for a company to rely on.  It is offered for IIS and Windows but we know 
not to do that for data that means anything!  A company policy about 
collaborative document creation should be in place to deal with the 
situations that arise when more than one person works on a document.  
MSWord and OOWriter both have methods for dealing with collaborative 
writing too.

I think James McKinney put it the best way:

Software solutions for idiot problems only make more incompetent idiots.

I love that!!  So craft your solution with company policy, education, and something simple that is robust and easy to use.  I wouldn't worry too much about extra features.  Just a good remotely accessible file server with appropriate accounts and the right company policy should be enough.
Dow




Jason Smith wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>This is not strictly a Linux question as much as a
>general technology question.
>
>Problem : Transparent document sharing
>
>1. I have a few colleagues who often travel to client
>sites.
>2. While away and also while in the office, they
>create documents on their (Windows) laptops.
>3. I would like to set things up so that the latest
>version of project related documents on their laptops
>are available to the rest of the (local) team.
>4. It would be best if this happened
>transparently/automatically ;as requiring someone to
>manually check in their documents does not seem to be
>effective.
>5. While working on their laptop they are not always
>connected to the Internet ... so the synchronization
>mechanism needs to occur whenever they do connect to
>the Internet.
>
>Solutions
>1. I was thinking of simple solutions like a script
>that woke up every 5 mins and would scp the documents
>over / send an email with the document as an
>attachment and so on.
>
>Are there more elegant non-obstrusive ways of doing
>this ?
>
>Thanks
>Coward
>
>
>		
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