Hello Francis,
Issue 2 (above), "managing access within a "large" and changing group of
people?"
This hasn't really been addressed and I believe that is the primary problem
here - not issue 1. Lets take some bandwidth to flesh out this issue and then
come to a resolution for solving the problem. I see two main topics for debate
on issue 2.
1 - People need access to a cloud storage system to share documents. Usually
this requires access credentials; unless you want the entire public domain to
be able to access the files. Therefore, you need to restrict access to a group
whose membership also changes over time. Adding/removing access requires some,
hopefully small, amount of administrative effort.
2 - People need an intuitive interface to, among other things, create, upload,
share and download files and to manage their access credentials themselves and
for an administrator of the system to manage group membership.
Others, please feel free to comment on this.
Discussion:
So far people have mentioned Box and Dropbox. These have free plans but are
limited and as far as I know do not provide an administrative mechanism to add
remove people from accessing documents. Yes you can share and unshare.. imagine
that on an organizational level at the ABRF. I have briefly used both as an
individual. At that level, what you want, administratively, would become
problematic. Its possible that institutional versions of these have
appropriate administrative functionality. That would cost money, however.
I do have experience with Google Drive/Docs etc. from an individual perspective
and as the first administrator of the Google Apps for Non-Profits that ABRF
currently uses to provide many services to ABRF members including cloud storage
and it is entirely free. In my opinion, this solution provides everything you
are asking for. But wait, there's more!
What I believe is the reason people have difficulty with the Google Drive
solution is simply one of gaining access and finding the files - over time.
The former requires access credentials with a Google account. But so do Box,
Dropbox et. al. So this problem is for the user to solve in any case. The
later can be handled by: creating a bookmark, installing Google Drive locally
on your PC/Laptop, or learning how to navigate around using a browser in Google
Drive. Though the various other cloud services may have a more intuitive file
browser interface, there will be some common issues such as initial learning
curve about how to access it, navigate it and then in the future remember "how
did I get to that file" issues.
I would recommend staying with Google Drive because it provides the cloud
storage, capacity and more importantly administrative controls necessary to
"manage access for a large changing group of individuals".
If this is still viable, then I'd be happy to discuss further to see how to
mitigate the problems you are relaying here for discussion.