Home Directory Portal Solution

[Mr.Ben]

I'm looking for a solution to a particular solution I want to give to my Staff and Students. I'm not sure if Sharepoint is the correct solution for this because of the costs of licencing.

 

Basically my Staff users all have laptops and use offline files for their home folders. I have had comments that this is a good solution except for the fact that users cannot get to my shared foilders at home (Offline files isn't an option here - the shares are huge (even the managed one)).

 

Basically I want a portal solution which my users can log into, and download, edit and upload files to my fileserver.

 

Any Ideas? The simpler the better!

[Dos_Box]

Once more WebDAV is your friend, and built into Windows for free.

 

http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/WebDAV-IIS.html

[robk]

We have just installed SSL explorer from http://www.sshtools.com. For remote desktop and Access to home directories and shared folders.

 

You only need port 443 (HTTPS) open to the outside world, and no changes to internal servers are needed.

 

Note the free community version works, there is no need to buy the enterprise one, unless you wanted any of the extra features.

 

There is a vmware appliance which is great to try it out.

 

I haven`t tried webdav, as I didn`t want to change access on our storage server.

 

HTH

 

RobK

[dan400007]

Be careful with webDAV. It will work but can be a bit of a pain on Vista with Office 2007.

 

In XP you could access webDAV using IE and use it as a normal folder, with Vista you can't do so anymore. You have to add it to My Computer as a network location. Also there is an update that would need installing on the client.

 

If you are going to use webDAV i'd recommend having browse through MSDN for how to create the script to manage R+W settings on individual sub folders. Then you can make it an opt-in option for staff, after all we all know how easy teacher passwords are to guess.

[m25man]

We have had this argument so many times before.

Every method has it's benefits and drawbacks.

 

This is the only method I recommend nowadays, you just install it and forget it and I have never had anything but praise from the staff for it's ease of use.

 

https://sslvpn.demo.sonicwall.com/cgi-bin/welcome

 

If your serious about remote access you will spend a lot of time and possibly money on the pc/server you choose the software you run and the setup and maintenance of it all.

Fit one of theese and become an instant hero.

[apearce]

There are one or two issues with webdev with Vista and Office 2007 but there are hot fixes that are available from MS at request. The hot fix will be added to Vista SP1.

 

Theres also a fix for sharepoint and it also sorted out my webdev

 

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/01/18/known-issue-office-2007-on-windows-vista-prompts-for-user-credentials-when-opening-documents-in-a-sharepoint-2007-site.aspx

[GrumbleDook]

If you don't want to go down MOSS 2007 you do have the option of WSS v3 instead. Not as feature rich but still quite powerful.

 

I haven't looked at it recently but I am sure there is now a Moodle block that allows file level access to shares.

[apearce]

are you refering to the moodle web parts for sharepoint!

 

http://www.codeplex.com/Moodle2003WP

[CyberNerd]

http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=991

[Guest AustenLowe]

It's about the only one useful feature of Exchange 2007s' OWA, you can have it work as a proxy to access any authorised unc paths on your intranet (that the owa server can access!)

[MrDB]

how about a simple asp based file manager which points at the share using iis?

 

Install ssl and allow download only!

 

Security would be as on site would have to enter domain username/pass?