Greetings. I'm posting several responses I got to my original question. Thanks very much for sharing your ideas! - Jonathan Brooks
I
don't know if this has been suggested to you already, but I highly recommend
the use of Google Drive. If the Mass Wildlife doesn't have access to this, it
is easy enough to create a personal account. These generally get 15GB space,
and are extremely easy to share with multiple people. People with access can
easily download, upload and edit documents as long as their permissions are
properly set.
Here at AppGeo we have a solution
that sounds like it would work for you. It's not a drop box but it is a
web app where you can upload you files to our hosted cloud, and include
indexing attribute data to make it searchable. It also has a GeoTagging
functionality so that you can geo-locate your documents. Thumbnails are also
created upon upload so that you can see a small preview of the documents when
doing your searches without having to download the whole document at
first. Since it's web based it can be used remotely and accessed by
multiple users simultaneously. We can set up user accounts to apply user roles
for administrator, Editor or just a publicly open site. If you are
interested, we can set up a screen sharing session and I can give you a quick
demo and more information. Do you know what/if you have for a budget for
this?
Have
you/they looked into Amazon S3? It might provide you with what you are
looking for. We are heavily vested in Amazon Web Services here and we
occasionally use S3 for file storage and transfer.
There
are many options which would allow this. You could use SharePoint which can be
integrated with Outlook, Web apps, SQL Server and more if you wanted to stay in
the Microsoft Environment. You could also set up a traditional web server with
an FTP site which would allow users to upload data using any FTP client or even
a web app.
Many document
management solutions also allow this type of functionality. The advantage they
bring to the table is their indexing and search functions. I have worked with
DocStar personally and really liked their applications. It also integrates with
ArcGIS if that is of interest plus has its own API for further integration.
As you mentioned you
could use a provider such as Box.com or DropBox or Google Drive. The issues
with these will be storage space. The more you store the more it costs. The
advantage of these is you don’t have to maintain the supporting infrastructure
or worry about them taking your own bandwidth unlike an internally hosted
solution.
In
my work I have encountered this situation as well. With the accessibility issue
we use SharePoint but this is not a long-term solution. Recently we purchased
an external hard drive that will retain the long-term documents but only one
person will be the monitor/gatekeeper/liaison to any requests for data from the
hard drive with a turnaround expectancy of 5 working days.
Greetings.
This is not exactly a GIS but more of an MIS question from a co-worker
at Mass Wildlife. I'm looking for suggestions on how others have
approached this. If you like, respond to me and I will sum and post.
Thanks very much. - Jonathan Brooks
The
BDI is looking to set up a drop box to house all of our active burn
plans and site plans; ideally something with the capability to house
files in a hierarchy of folders, with a lot of storage space, and
something that various people
can upload files into. The idea is to create a repository for this
information that is free of the network, and therefore able to be
remotely accessed.
Do
you know if there’s a function in our Outlook that has this ability, or
some other agency program that can be used for this? If not, do you
know of a private set-up that you would recommend? I use box.com for
this now, which works
well, but don’t know if we have something in-house that would work, or
if there might be something better.
