Hi Brian,
Fully agreed that all solutions have a learning curve and that some have more
intuitive interfaces than others. In enterprise instances of Box, there's a
pretty robust set of administrative roles that can grant and remove access
rights for their own specific directories (folders owned by these
administrators). It's also pretty supportive of joint document collaboration
(browser-based instances of Microsoft Suite products). I've used Google Drive
for the same purposes (collaborating on a presentation for ABRF, actually), and
their suite of software gets at all the same functionality, often with
assistance of proprietary Google-based applications. But...
At Northwestern, we upgraded email services a number of years ago. The initial
thought was that everything would migrate to Gmail (@u.northwestern.edu, the
same standard used by many schools who also use Google for email). However,
there was strong pushback from faculty that did not want their emails to be
subject to the "Google scrutiny machine", so we maintain a Microsoft Exchange
server for faculty and staff email (students use Gmail). I might imagine
similar pushback at institutions for other Google services, which all operate
on the same "free" model, where the data is mined for purposes that are not
transparent to its originators.
Best Regards,
Aaron
Aaron Rosen
Senior Financial Analyst
Office for Research, Core Facilities Administration
Northwestern University
633 Clark Street
Evanston, IL 60208
(847) 467-1804
On 9/19/18, 12:41 PM, "ABRF IT Discussion Forum on behalf of Brian Hampton"
<email obscured> on behalf of <email obscured>> wrote:
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.