Sharing Files via the web

[lug at the-leveys.us (Don Levey)]

On Thu, 2006-06-01 at 17:50 -0400, John Abreau wrote:
> Don Levey wrote:
> > 
> > Matt,
> > What do you mean by "sharing"?  If you're looking for something akin to
> > source-code control, I seem to recall Linux Journal recently posted an
> > article on Subversion via WebDAV; that may be of help to you.
> >  -Don
> 
> I'm looking for something like that, too. In my case, the users want
> to guarantee that only one person at a time can edit the shared Word and
> Excel files, but everyone in the group can have read-only access.
> 
> I found some Windows CVS clients, but as I understand it, CVS allows
> multiple users to check out a document. Something more like RCS would
> suit my needs better, but I've had no luck finding a Windows RCS client.
> 

Hmm... This is more than just file sharing - you want something to make
sure that the file remains read-only once it has been downloaded to the
client PC.  That will be tougher.  The only solutions I've seen that
resemble this require a client-side plugin to Word or the like; the
plugin would be required to *read* the document, and that plugin would
then control access rights.

> What I'm looking for:
> 
> > The file would have to be available to only one person at a time
> > (all others could access it in read-only format), and each person
> > on the list above would need read/write privileges.  Can you suggest
> > a way to address this that will be easy for all involved, yet prevent
> > errors due to multiple document versions?
> 
As I understand it, you should be able to get a source-control system to
control rights so that one user at a time has the file "locked".  But
that, then, would need to control permissions on the client in a way
that couldn't be subverted.

> I can deploy this via Samba or via a web server; either is fine.
> Is anyone familiar with a file sharing system that can do this?
> 
> If CVS were able to lock files so only one person could check a given
> file out at a time, that would solve the problem. Is there a way to
> make CVS do that?
> 
>