A non-web website

June 17, 2009 4:40 PM

HTML pages to link to files on a network drive?

My manager wants to set up some html pages saved to the network drive for staff to use. These will link to frequently referred to documents so that we can organize and describe these documents in multiple ways. There are a lot of files, but they are being edited down from the full mass of what is kept on the network drive. This is instead of setting up a wiki on the company intranet. It's a bureaucratic maze attempting to get space there. Is this a pretty straightforward thing to do, or are we likely to run into trouble later on? It seems a little strange, but I could just be lacking in imagination in my ability to think of workarounds. Is there a better non-web-based solution? In other words, google sites is not an option. Also, maybe this is obvious already, but I have very limited techie skills.

posted by anonymous to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Is this a pretty straightforward thing to do, or are we likely to run into trouble later on?

Depends on how you link. If everything is relative to the current top level directory it may work for a while (e.g. html document is in Z:\foo\ and linked docs are in Z:\foo\sub\, and you link as ".\sub\taxfiles.doc"). If you are linking to external document sources (e.g. \\servername\foo\bar\baz\IRSrules.doc) things will break anytime a server or directory name changes.

Strange - usually companies have to compel people to use wikis. They should be glad you're taking the initiative to use it. You can look into the million other CMSes around for more robust solutions. Also, what are the documents you will be linking to? Are they Office docs, and can you convert them to HTML? This would distinguish between needing a CMS vs. needing a document management space.
posted by benzenedream at 5:08 PM on June 17

If the clients/desktops are all Windows, you can use file:////server/share/dir/file.ext in your href's. That's four slashes: two for the protocol (file:) and two for Windows' server network addressing scheme.

Macintosh would be similar but likely different. You'd need to have a different set of links for each file, but you could just do something like:

super_file.doc [win] [mac]

...where each is a link formatted for that OS.
posted by rhizome at 8:02 PM on June 17

It will work, but its a potential nightmare.

First you've got permissions issues to deal with. Typically not everyone has access to all the various folders on a network drive. If you put up a static HTML page that links to files in a shared location, everyone will see the file exists (could be problematic in itself), and then get an access denied when they try and click through to open the file.

Shared network drives tend to become a dumping ground for files. If this is the case for your company, the HTML files are going to become stale fast. Who will maintain them? It can become a massive time-suck.

Why do you need a non web based solution? Can your department maintain its own server? Windows SharePoint Services is free with Windows Server 2003, and you can host up to 4GB of documents with the free SQL server. Its easy to setup and maintain and will be inifinitely more flexible than a set of HTML files (which is web based, btw).

There may be other free Document Management Systems out there, but I'm not familiar with them.
posted by askmehow at 9:07 PM on June 17

This is exactly what I'm trying to do at my company. Please, please memail me when you figure it out. :)
posted by desjardins at 8:42 AM on June 18