Sharing network drive files
For the better part of 10+ years, we've relied on various network drives to allow file sharing. One drive letter for sharing files between teams, a separate file share for the entire organization, a third for personal use, etc. I would like to move away from this and I am trying to decide if a solution like ECM / Sharepoint or a home application is worth the cost and the way to go? Or if we just have to rely on login scripts / mapped drives for file sharing due to its relative simplicity? Does anyone have exeperience in their own organization or thoughts on this?
Thank.
SharePoint is very good at document sharing.
Documents usually follow an approval process, have permissions, live in clusters ... and these things lend themselves well to SharePoint document libraries.
However, there are some things that cannot live well in SharePoint ... do you have a virtual hard disk (.vhd) file that you want to share with one of your friends? It's not a good idea to try putting a 20GB file in SharePoint.
SharePoint can handle large files and that's why SQL Server is behind it ... but do you want your SQL Server bandwidth to be saturated with such large files? Do you want your SQL Server backup to keep copies of such large files multiple times?
I believe there are several Microsoft partners that are offering the option to disable file blobs from the SharePoint database so that SharePoint can store metadata and the file system contains the actual files, and SharePoint just becomes a gateway to access control, permissions, and offer a centralized interface for files by the entire organization. It will offer you the best of both worlds.
I currently think SharePoint is ideal for documents and I keep large files (not document oriented) in Windows shared folders.
Definitely use a tool.
The main advantage here is version control. Ability to easily jump to a previous version, discern and see who changed what (see most VCS "blame / annotate tool" - it prints a text file showing when / who changed each line in the text file).
Second, you can probably take advantage of issue tracking / task tracking.
Other benefits include Internet access from the Internet, having a wiki (which can be great in some situations), etc.
I use Subversion + Redmine at work and I find it very useful - test several solutions and you will surely find out the additional benefits for yourself.
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One thing that can be overlooked when changing your document management tool is the planning required for how much will be stored and information architecture issues like when other content will run out.
SharePoint is especially easy to set up without a good plan for the future, and is especially vulnerable to hardships later on when things get busy.
I would not recommend a home app for something like this. The problem has been solved with shelf tools, and growing from scratch will cost a hefty amount and won't help you access features for money.
Did I mention how important it is to plan your security teams and document areas (IA)?
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If you only need document storage, sharepoint can work very well. WSS is free and provides very good document storage capabilities.
But you have to plan carefully, as updating existing applications is painful. If you decide to go with Sharepoint, I can give you some head-to-head advice.
- Pay attention to the security configuration (user groups, privileges, ..)
- Plan out your document libraries as it is not easy to just move documents around to reveal them.
- Also consider the limited number of versions a document can have, since sharepoint keeps full backups to expose versions, not just changes.
- Don't use infopath :) we have a very bad experience with it (just don't tell the managers about it)
- If you don't need to change the Sharepoint GUI, don't worry about it as it causes a lot of problems (I'm talking about custom master pages and custom site templates).
- Try to use as much OOB content as possible, because not only is it more expensive to develop your own web pages, but it can also be quite difficult.
- Make sure to index your search in turn. This is quite tricky because it is disabled by default and then you will be surprised that search doesn't work like I did :)
If you try to simply expand it and load 10,000 documents into it, then you will most likely have problems with it later. If you think a little about structure, you end up with a really good document repository.
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Migration is probably worth the cost in the long run. You get reliability, version control, traceability, and extensibility.
Make sure to define the groups / rights first and determine which links need to be fixed (perhaps you have apps that use links to shared resources).
The open source alternative for SharePoint is Alfresco , which is very good for CIFS (Windows partitions).
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