On 11/23/2013 10:57 AM, David Mintz wrote:
Anybody have any recommendations for a good web-based, free file
manager? That's pretty much the bottom line, but here's the full story.
Google Drive. Setup a gmail account, sign up for drive, and you can
setup shared folders. You can make them public. You can make them
private. You can give other Google Accounts[both gmail and Google Apps]
any level of rights you need.
There are also quite a number of "sync" apps which will sync a Google
Drive with a local folder... both my Linux Mint boxes are running a
gdrive sync app which keeps all the files in one of my folders synced.
I don't recall what the limit on the free accounts are, I know it's in
the Gigabyte range.
If you want to project a more "professional" appearance and you have a
domain name, you can sign up for Google Apps for Business. It's
50$/year per user account - so the minimum is $5/month or $50 a year for
a one user account. You can use as little of their services as you
want, or as many as you want. That's were my comment about "You can
give other Google Accounts[both gmail and Google Apps] any level of
rights you need." comes in - since for all the people who need "write"
access to the shared drive you don't need to create a $50/year account
for them - they can use a regular gmail account or an account from any
Google Apps for Business account.
Also if this is a registered non profit or an Educational institute, you
don't even need to pay $50/year. Both those groups can get Google Apps
accounts for free:
<http://www.google.com/nonprofits/products/>http://www.google.com/nonprofits/join/
http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/education/
As a geek, I really hate the idea of using Google Apps because there are
countless numbers of tweaks that I like to make that you just can't[with
Dovecot + Postfix I can use any seperator I want for VERP and do all
sorts of cool filtering stuff] - but at the end of the day I found
myself spending more of my time on stupid infrastructure crap that was
fun to work on, but not economically justifiable.
As an end user, I truly hate the Google Apps administrative interface
because they have so /many/ free services available that the interface
is cluttered beyond belief. Do yourself a favor and never ever show
them the admin interface, just set things up and leave it alone.
Privacy can be an issue. I personally am of the opinion that I have no
privacy on the internet,, so I'm not too concerned with the fact that
Google uses these services to amalgamate data mining and product overall
metrics. However that doesn't mean I dismiss those who are concerned
about that sort of thing - so if the client is concerned about that sort
of thing than Google Apps is not the answer.
So, to sum up:
If it is a non-profit or an educational group, look into a free Google
Apps account. If it is not one of those, a simple Google Account or if
it is worth $5/month a Google Apps for Business account.
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