Dear ABRF IT group,
Have any of you stumble across a simple solutions for:
1.) storing and accessing small size (no bigger than 25MB powerpoints)
documents?
2.) managing access within a "large" and changing group of people?
Many groups in ABRF find it impossible to share docs using our google accounts.
Maybe this is because some use a gmail account (personal or an ABRF one) while
others do not ... but unless we can solve this easily ... the association needs
another solution.
Any ideas why accessing (seeing) documents on a google drive could be a problem
for some?
Might DropBox be one good alternative
Do you know of other potential (free/cheap) solutions?
Thanks for any help you can provide.
Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) also uses Box or shared drives.
Noting the suggestion in the previous email to use of Drop Box, I would
caution that it's not a safe alternative and many academic institutions
don't support it. Box, in this case, is supported by CWRU, therefore
additional protections are in place for data use and sharing.
Erin
On Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 1:59 PM, Aaron Rosen <email obscured>>
wrote:
Rest of post
> We use "Box" at Northwestern For document collaboration frequently, and it
> seems pretty amenable to most staff.
>
> Aaron Rosen
> Senior Financial Analyst
> Northwestern University
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 12:52 PM -0500, "Frances Weis-Garcia" <
> <email obscured><email obscured>>>
> wrote:
>
>
> Dear ABRF IT group,
>
> Have any of you stumble across a simple solutions for:
> 1.) storing and accessing small size (no bigger than 25MB powerpoints)
> documents?
> 2.) managing access within a "large" and changing group of people?
>
> Many groups in ABRF find it impossible to share docs using our google
> accounts. Maybe this is because some use a gmail account (personal or an
> ABRF one) while others do not ... but unless we can solve this easily ...
> the association needs another solution.
>
> Any ideas why accessing (seeing) documents on a google drive could be a
> problem for some?
> Might DropBox be one good alternative
> Do you know of other potential (free/cheap) solutions?
>
> Thanks for any help you can provide.
>
> Frances
> ??
> View topic https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__list.
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>
> ββ
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>
--
R. Erin Fogarty, MA, CRA
Director, Office of Grants and Contracts
Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine
10900 Euclid Ave. Cleveland, OH 44106
P: 216-368-0735
F: 216-368-0929
OHSU also approves Box.com as a safe cloud storage solution. It is simple to
share directories and files with others.
Craige
Craige Mazur
System/Application Analyst
University Shared Resources
Phone: 503-494-6563
<email obscured>
On 7/24/18, 11:17 AM, "ABRF IT Discussion Forum on behalf of Erin Fogarty"
<email obscured> on behalf of <email obscured>> wrote:
Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) also uses Box or shared drives.
Noting the suggestion in the previous email to use of Drop Box, I would
caution that it's not a safe alternative and many academic institutions
don't support it. Box, in this case, is supported by CWRU, therefore
additional protections are in place for data use and sharing.
Erin
On Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 1:59 PM, Aaron Rosen <email obscured>>
wrote:
> We use "Box" at Northwestern For document collaboration frequently, and
it
> seems pretty amenable to most staff.
>
> Aaron Rosen
> Senior Financial Analyst
> Northwestern University
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 12:52 PM -0500, "Frances Weis-Garcia" <
> <email obscured><email obscured>>>
> wrote:
>
>
> Dear ABRF IT group,
>
> Have any of you stumble across a simple solutions for:
> 1.) storing and accessing small size (no bigger than 25MB powerpoints)
> documents?
> 2.) managing access within a "large" and changing group of people?
>
> Many groups in ABRF find it impossible to share docs using our google
> accounts. Maybe this is because some use a gmail account (personal or an
> ABRF one) while others do not ... but unless we can solve this easily ...
> the association needs another solution.
>
> Any ideas why accessing (seeing) documents on a google drive could be a
> problem for some?
> Might DropBox be one good alternative
> Do you know of other potential (free/cheap) solutions?
>
> Thanks for any help you can provide.
>
> Frances
> ??
> View topic https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__list.
> abrf.org_r_topic_26FeWZGZ8ImRA2LswxrDqd&d=DwIFaQ&c=
> yHlS04HhBraes5BQ9ueu5zKhE7rtNXt_d012z2PA6ws&r=PlTme4TgK1KLiDCme2ZTVIM6E-
> ZSTj6KYGN_g5Yp2Fo&m=IYybsAiPmQ7xswmnhjE7SvW2DHn6QMxsewyaDtLkzuI&s=
> 4tumYOOUUgRS2sk4yWQsdGV4WvebKV9nDhdCQceSQIQ&e=
> Leave group <email obscured>?Subject=Unsubscribe
>
>
>
> ββ
> View topic http://list.abrf.org/r/topic/70kluorYEcxvolWlgSiq2g
> Leave group <email obscured>?Subject=Unsubscribe
>
>
--
R. Erin Fogarty, MA, CRA
Director, Office of Grants and Contracts
Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine
10900 Euclid Ave. Cleveland, OH 44106
P: 216-368-0735
F: 216-368-0929
ββ
View topic http://list.abrf.org/r/topic/5RruWQwPVrmWyeFRiK7FAc
Leave group <email obscured>?Subject=Unsubscribe
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.
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
ο»ΏOn 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.
Thank you gentlemen for your thoughtful feedback.
Glad to hear you are in favor of Google's cloud. I am too.
For work, I just got exposed to Box ... so far so good with respect to a not so
simple commonly used excel file.
ο»Ώ-----Original Message-----
From: ABRF IT Discussion Forum <email obscured>> on behalf of Aaron J
Rosen <email obscured>>
Reply-To: <email obscured>>
Date: Wednesday, September 19, 2018 at 2:06 PM
To: <email obscured>" <email obscured>>
Subject: Re: [ABRF IT] edocument storage / access solutions
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
ο»ΏOn 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.