67GB share

[DarkRanger]

Don't know if this is the right section, but hell, any help will be appreciated.

I work in an office in Lynnwood. Our company has offices in both Cape Town and Durban. In Lynnwood we have a knowledge management folder on our server (which is like our library). It is 67GB in size. I need to figure out a way to make this folder accessible to all 3 offices and employees working on site.

Any ideas? I have no idea what to look at. An external webserver of that size is going to cost us a fortune...

[IcePick88]

Depends.

Are the three offices in a domain forest together? Do you want the data to be just available, or will different people make changes to the same documents?

How does the offices communicate with each other? I mean, do they have their own WAN or what?

[Abatis]

why not use dropbox? a 100gb package wil cost you $20 a month and it will work brilliantly for something like this

[DarkRanger]

The offices aren't connected to the same network. There is no communication between them.

People will also not be able to make changes to any documents. These documents/programs/sheets/drawings will be read only and will only be there as a guide. Data just needs to be available.

@Abatis, dropbox wont support exactly what we want to do. These documents fall under different categories but are not limited to these categories. Let's say a file named construction manual.pdf falls under the Civil folder (physical folder). It is still related to water works, construction and architecture (as an example) and will be tagged to lie under these 'virtual folders'. We've got a system running here that works the way we want it to, but it was never thought through. So I'm in charge of now moving this system and making changes to it to make all the information on that available to anyone who has access, anywhere.

[Sojourn]

You need a system that supports indexing tags.
The schelp would be that you will have to add relevant tags to each and every document depending on their relevant applicable categories.
Taking this to a 3rd party would be your only choice because there are no inter-connectivity between the offices.
What is your budget?

[hamin_aus]

I had the exact same problem with the knowledge management system used by a client back in SA.
All their sites were on the same domain, but spread out in DBN, JHB, CT, PE & EL on 256K diginet lines which had to share all network and mail traffic as well as knowledge management.
They had the exact same problem which was eventually partially solved by putting the knowledge management system in terminal services.
So basically you had one central KM server that everyone connected to via TS.
This worked well for routine viewing and editing, but uploading new documents was still quite painful, but for a two site setup it may work a lot better.

I'd suggest setting up a new server, putting terminal services on it with as many CAL's as needed, moving the folder onto that server. You might have to look at VPN or something similar to be accessible from anywhere...

Edited because I didn't read the whole thread before replying...

[DarkRanger]

You need a system that supports indexing tags.
The schelp would be that you will have to add relevant tags to each and every document depending on their relevant applicable categories.
Taking this to a 3rd party would be your only choice because there are no inter-connectivity between the offices.
What is your budget?

As said, we already have a systems that does everything we want it to. We just need to make it available to people outside the Lynnwood office.
At the moment I need to come up with proposals to make it possible for us to do this, so there has been no budget set out for this.

@ Jamin: Uploading is not an issue, as this will be controlled by one user (and as it grows, more users in the same location will be added for uploading). Thanks for the suggestion, looks like it might actually be a viable option.

[Sojourn]

I see.
VPN will probably be your only viable option to get the connectivity sorted out once you have the hosting sorted.

edit - Jamn beat me to it.

[DarkRanger]

I see.
VPN will probably be your only viable option to get the connectivity sorted out once you have the hosting sorted.

edit - Jamn beat me to it.

Pfffft dammit... VPN sounds nice, but speed might be an issue.

AFAIK speeds at the moment is very bad with regards to VPN's

[Sojourn]

It depends. They only want to view the files, no uploads of any kind.
Should be fine.

[JollyJamma]

1) Blue ray writer-R900ex
Blue ray disk-R50
Burn data to disk and send to clients/people/whoever

2) create 3 Dropbox accounts and then past the data from the blue rays into the folder

3) update data when needed which happens automatically

4) or use an FTP site.

[hamin_aus]

Yeah, use an internet service with no SLA's or guaranteed reliability for your critical business systems.
I'm sure your company will love that, especially at audit time!