Recommend an online file management system?

fpm

Background: I do a little website building in my spare time, nothing too flashy or fancy.My sister-in-law recently got me to do a website for a company she's a director in. Now she's come back with the following request:

The company has several directors, all in different locations around Ireland and the UK. They would like an online system where they could keep meeting minutes and other documents,that they could access locally on their own machine. Obviously it would be best if they could upload documents themselves, rather than them having to go through me. They do not need revision control, or editing, just really an online 'filing cabinet'. I'm not able to write something like this myself, I've looked around and there seems to be a number of 'scripts' that say they can do this.

Can anyone recommend one to me, or maybe there's an existing online facility for exactly this? System can't cost a fortune, must be very simple to use (directors are not tech-minded!), and allow around 5 users.

Any suggestions gratefully received!
Thanks.

Trojan

Dropbox.

Red Alert

I'd definitely second Dropbox; brilliant piece of software.

fpm

Thanks guys, I've had a look through the site, and it seems very good. My only concern is that it seems like all the users who want to share the files have to install dropbox on their machines? Is that correct? As all the users are remote, I would prefer if they didn't have to do this.

You could look at a document management system. Its been a few years since I've done research on these, for a project that never went ahead, but if memory serves there are open source ones with good features - highly configurable permissions, document expiry, version control, locking, etc. It would be an order of magnitude more complex than dropbox, but would also give more options and security.

voxpop

Ive used alfresco before. It might be a bit overkill for what you want but its basically a opensource(free) document management system.

Evil Phil

Microsoft have Mesh. Which does have an install but it provides access to your Mesh folders through a browser without it afaik. Mesh folders can be shared too.

Eoin

Microsoft OneNote is great, but it might not meet all the needs. There's sharepoint as well, but there could be a good bit of configuration needed there.

MOH

I've started using Google Wave for sharing stuff between home and work.
Just start a wave, share it with whoever you want, attach documents to it

Pros:
- Don't have to install anything
- Uploads seem to be very quick
- Can easily share with new people by adding them to the wave
- I *think* it also acts as a versioning system - if you replace one version of an attached doc with an updated version, I think you can still access the older version through playback

Cons:
- Hardly anyone actually has google wave yet
- Can't edit documents in situ - have to save them locally and re-upload (though you can delete the original attachment)
- Not sure exactly how secure it is

Works well for me so far though.

Oddly, someone had recommended Dropbox to me the day before I got my Wave invite and I'd been going to try it out, but don't really need it now.

Evil Phil

eoin wrote: »

Microsoft OneNote is great, but it might not meet all the needs. There's sharepoint as well, but there could be a good bit of configuration needed there.

Microsoft BPOS has Sharepoint online but BPOS is probably overkill in this situation. If I was looking at Sharepoint for 4 or 5 people I'd probably go with Google Docs.

fpm

Thanks again guys, great info...more options than I knew existed...!