network drive file sharing

Question

For the better part of 10 years + we have relied on various network mapped drives to allow file sharing. One drive letter for sharing files between teams, a seperate file share for the entire organization, a third for personal use etc. I would like to move away from this and am trying to decide if an ECM/Sharepoint type solution, or home grown app, is worth the cost and the way to go? Or if we should simply remain relying on login scripts/mapped drives for file sharing due to its relative simplicity? Does anyone have any exeperience within their own organization or thoughts on this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

SharePoint is very good at document sharing.

Documents generally follow a process for approval, have permissions, live in clusters... and these things lend themselves well to SharePoints document libraries.

However there are somethings that don't lend themselves well to living inside SharePoint... do you have a virtual hard drive (.vhd) file that you want to share with a workmate? Not such a good idea to try and put a 20GB file into SharePoint.

SharePoint can handle large files, and so can SQL Server behind it... but do you want your SQL Server bandwidth being saturated by such large files? Do you want your backup of SQL Server to hold copies of such large files multiple times?

I believe that there are a few Microsoft partners who offer the ability to disassociate file blobs from the SharePoint database, so that SharePoint can hold the metadata and a file system holds the actual files, and SharePoint simply becomes the gateway to manage access, permissions, and offer a centralised interface to files throughout an organisation. This would offer you the best of both worlds.

Right now though, I consider SharePoint ideal for documents, and I keep large files (that are not document centric) on Windows file shares.

Answer 2

Definetely, use a tool.

The main benefit here is version control. Being able to jump easily to a previous version, diff'ing and seeing who modified what (see most VCS' blame/annotate tool- it prints out a text file showing when/who modified each line in the text file).

Second, you can probably benefit from issue tracking/task tracking.

Other benefits include web access from the internet, having a wiki (which can be great in some situations), etc.

I use Subversion + Redmine at work, and I find it highly useful- test a few solutions and you will surely find out further advantages for you.

Answer 3

One thing that can be overlooked in the change to an document management tool is the planning required around how much is going to be stored and information architecture issues like where different content is going to end up.

SharePoint particularly is easy to setup without a good plan going forward and is particularly vulnerable to difficulties later on when things get to busy.

I would not recommend a home grown app for something like this. The problem has been solved by off the shelf tools and growing one from scratch is going to cost a huge amount and not get you any way near the features for the money.

Did I mention how important planning your security groups and document areas (IA) was?

Answer 4

If you need just document storage then sharepoint can do very well. WSS is ewen free and it provides very good document storage capabilities.

But you have to plan carefully as updating existing applications is painfull. If you decide to go with Sharepoint then I can give you few advices from top of my head

1. Pay attention to security configuration (user groups, privilegies,..)
2. Plan your document libraries well as it is not easy to just move documents betveen them
3. Also consider limiting number of versions that one document can have, because sharepoint stores full backups betveen verions, not just changes
4. Don't use infopath:) we have very bad experience with it (just don't tell this to managers)
5. If you don't really need to change graphical look of Sharepoint than don't bother with it as it brings many problems (I'm talking about custom masterpages and custom site templates)
6. Try to use as much OOB stuff as possible, because developing your own webparts not only cost more, but it can be quite complicated.
7. Make sure to turn-on search indexing. This is quite tricky, because it is by default turned off and then you will be as surprised that search is not working as I was :)

If you try to just deploy it and load 10.000 documents into it then you will surely have problems with it later. If you give a little thought about structure then you will end up with really good document storage.

Answer 5

Migrating is very probably worth the cost in the long term. You will gain reliability, versioning, traceability, and extensibility.

Be sure to first identify the groups/rights, and to identify which links need to be fixed (maybe you have applications that use links to the shares).

An open source alternative to SharePoint is Alfresco, it is very good for CIFS (Windows shares) too.