Delgated ad-hoc and secure file sharing

#1

Hello,

I need a method to easily share files securely on an ad-hoc basis, and I need to delegate management of that sharing and security to others. What is the best method/app/software to do this with for our site?

Scenario: Working Unit Foo needs to share a collection of private documents with contractors Blue and Orange. The collection is about 500mb. Blue & Orange need to upload documents for Foo’s review. Orange and Blue aren’t allowed to see each others uploads.

The contracts frequent are short term. Next month it’s Red and Brown’s turn and after that Green and Tan. This means setting up the private share can’t be too involved. The delegates are computer savvy but don’t know much if anything about running servers or websites.

Repeat for Working Unit’s Smee, Jabberwocky, and Boojum.

I maintain and run the domain, ftp and websites. I am not at all interested in managing said sharing site or folders. Up until now we’ve been using ftp, but I don’t want to manage the user accounts and as near as I can tell Dreamhost won’t allow delegating ftp user account management without also granting access to the entire hosting plan.

I’ve thought about just asking each of the Working Units to buy their own Dreamhost hosting plan and say ‘have fun’, but then they’d each have to get a new domain. (and it just smells wrong).

Soooo, what do you fine folks recommend?

thanks in advance for your time and thoughts.

#2

I don’t know what the limit on the max size of an single attached document would be, but as far as permissions and delegation go mediawiki comes to mind as a solution for your need.

#3

As it’s designed primarily for creating a public wiki (e.g, Wikipedia), MediaWiki doesn’t have any way to set page-specific permissions. So that won’t work.

Twiki might. I have no experience setting it up, so I can’t say how easy or difficult it might be to set up.

#4

It’s unlikely that something using mediawiki/twiki and similar apps page attachment model would be received well. One-at-a-time-serial up and downloads are a nuisance. The collections are typically dozens of files at a time, and nobody will happy downloading a 500mb zip in order to use one or two 20mb word docs.

Thanks for the suggestions though. I’ve not looked at twiki/foswiki for a number of years. Looks like they’ve been busy.