Simple and secure password protected file sharing?

[Duranis]

So I have been asked to set up somewhere that documents for governors can be put and accessed by them via a link with a premade password. This does not seem to be quite so simple as I thought it would be though.

 

What I'm looking for is:

No need for people create an account to access the files but do need to enter a password (this is the most difficult requirement).

Ideally free (its only a small amount of documents).

Secure.

Easy to use.

 

Looking at the obvious (google, onedrive and dropbox) all 3 seem to either need people to create an account to access the files or you basically create an open link which means anyone with that link can access the documents. I can't find an option in any of these three that will let me create a link to the documents but require a password to access them, maybe I'm just missing it?

 

In the past I either had complete access to the webserver so could set up my own solution or just used google/dropbox as most people in the real world have access to them anyway.

 

If we had a halfway decent CMS for our webpage and weren't paying stupid amounts for very small amounts of bandwidth/storage I would do it on there but this is not an option.

 

The only other thing I can think to do in order to keep it simple is create a new Gmail account and share the folder with that. Then give the governors the username and password for that account. This way they wont all have to create new accounts and it should be easier for the people using it to manage. As the files should be read only anyway it should not be an issue. Not overly keen on having multiple people using one email address and I would have it set up so it is not associated with the school but still less than ideal.

 

Any ideas on an elegant solution?

[edutech4schools]

You could use a zip software as most can also encrypt / password protect a file or folder and then share that over Google although I would probably not do this myself and would just get everyone an account with Google Apps for ed as it's free and comes with unlimited space.

 

You could also use Office 365 but none of my schools use this so can not help with that.

[Duranis]

Thanks, glad I wasn't just missing something obvious . I have pretty much come to the same conclusion, the only proper way to do it will be to create individual accounts on google or pay silly money to get a password protected area set up on our website (next year I really want to bring that in house). Will run the plan past SLT and see how they feel about it.

[edutech4schools]

You could also take a look at home access plus (think it's called that) which you can find on this site. Basically gives you remote Web access to a server share and it's free.