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CHALLENGE

Sharing documents with customers securely?

Asked by Todd, Chantilly, VA - March 11, 2010

We're a small government research company with hundreds of clients. We are using Linux and Apache for our public web servers, all hosted in a remote data center. We have a massive repository (hundreds of GBs) of research documents (PDF, Word, Excel) that are available to our customers on a subscription basis -- once they've paid for a subscription they can login to our web application and access any of these hyperlinked documents, which are currently just sitting on our web server. These documents do not have any sort of protection on them, and the hyperlinks can be shared with anybody. There is also no versioning of the documents -- when a document is updated, there's no way to track what was changed. Can you give us an idea of the best way to protect our document repository, without adding frustration for the current customers? In addition, how can we track the versions of the documents and allow customers to see what was changed? We are assuming that we need some sort of document management system, but we need advice on which one would serve our needs, and our budget.

Topics: Applications , Collaboration , Infrastructure Management

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  • Hi Todd,

    It sounds like you want to look into a Document Management web application, perhaps something like KnowledgeTree (http://www.knowledgetree.com). The community edition is open source PHP, so modding it to include a subscription module.

    >>without adding frustration for the current customers

    There isn't a lot you can do about that. If you switch to secure model, the customers who are coming in with direct links are going to be frustrated and will have to be retrained to use the new system. But if you add enough bells and whistles to the new system, most will be happy to do so.

    Jason
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