Online file sharing for dummies

May 25, 2017 4:44 PM

Does your work use a secure online file storage and management system? Can you tell me about it?

We want to set up a file sharing and management system across geographically remote employees - about 40 in total. We need to have folders (projects) that can be easily searched for independently but can also be nested into groups. Outside of projects, we also need a place to store policy documents, ideally with the ability to notify individuals when they're due for review, and when changes need to be signed off. The whole thing would have various levels of access (managers can see everything, junior staff have limited access). Does anything like this exist? Security is the #1 issue, everything else is negotiable.

posted by superfish to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

The classics are Dropbox and Box. My company uses Box because at the time of choosing Box was the more enterprise solution and Dropbox wasn't HIPAA compliant/HITRUST certified, but Dropbox has been courting that audience and they are now, so you should choose based on exact featureset and whatnot. Either should meet your security needs, as if they meet HIPAA/HITRUST they're quite secure. I would make sure you can set up SSO/user management for any solution you choose as that's likely to be the biggest source of weakness.
posted by brainmouse at 4:50 PM on May 25, 2017

Microsoft OneDive and/or SharePoint Online via Office 365 does this also.
posted by Eddie Mars at 5:57 PM on May 25, 2017

If you want easy sync to your local machines, then use Dropbox for Teams.

If you don't mind this shit all living in needlessly complicated web pages, and you also want (maybe) workflow and whatnot, then look into Sharepoint Online.
posted by uberchet at 6:15 PM on May 25, 2017 [1 favorite]

If you need the hardware/software in-house for whatever reason, OwnCloud is pretty great. We use it at my office for secure file sharing and sync. If you can use a cloud offering, it may be worth it -- I wasn't involved in TCO calculations but I bet if you don't have a dedicated IT staff with network ops experience, it would be cheaper to pay for one of the cloud services described above than to stand up and secure/maintain the capability.
posted by Alterscape at 6:21 PM on May 25, 2017 [2 favorites]