Dropboxes on Lan?

[cheesypete]

Don't know if this is possible / feasible but have had a couple of requests from different departments, both wanting the same sort of thing...

 

We currently have a "shared area" on our LAN, which is split into two folders - Staff and Student

 

The Staff folder, is obviously for staff ONLY

The Student folder, is accessible by all, but only staff can write to it - students can only pick out / read the files that are in there

 

This has worked well for aeons, but now some staff want folders setting up per teaching group, whereby the students they teach in these groups can save work into the folder but they cant be allowed access to others work (plagiarism / messing etc)

 

Now before somone shouts "Learning Platforms (!)" , after many hours of paper diagrams I know that this is pretty much what we are looking at, but we are a long way off getting ours off the ground and it opens up a quagmire of staff training etc

 

My head is now too bogged down with folder permissions - is there something out there that will do what i want? An online dropbox could work, but ideally we need something sitting on our LAN which is readily available from a mapped drive / shortcut and with minimum setting up

 

If i'm being asked too much (which i think i am!) then i need someone to tell me!!!