HTTP File Transfer Software

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
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4,898
I'm looking for some software to run on a Windows Server to allow the transfer of files to and from our clients and consultants.

We have a lot of clients - some we deal with every day, some might be a one-off. Some are big corporates or public sector organisations, other are self employed people sending stuff in from their broadband at home.

At the moment we're using email but it's just not reliable enough - people keep trying to send us enormous attachments where our IT department limit emails to 20Mb, stuff gets stopped by spam filtering systems and in other cases our clients firewalls stop emails coming out due to size or file type content.

The obvious solution is to set up an FTP server which would overcome some issues, but I know a lot of corporates don't allow FTP from the desktop by default and my experience is people just won't get into the debate with their IT people about opening it up. I would therefore prefer something that runs over HTTP or HTTPS (or preferably both as required)

Other features I would like:

-Ability to setup accounts for regular users
-Ability to email a link to a one-off client to allow them to upload
-Email alerts when someone transfers a file to us
-Abilty to email a client a link to download a file from us, possibly automatic deletion or email notification once downloaded.

I know stuff like dropbox will do much of this, but for political reasons this must live on our network and be totally under our control. We already run other web servers so have the infrastructure in place to support another.

Anyone got any suggestions?

Cheers.
 
Have you got access to any developer resources at your company? I'm sure they could knock up a simple script in php for example to cater for your requirements.
 
i don't mean this to be a negative comment, but i would be the first to suggest actually talking to your i.t. department upfront about what your looking to achieve and let them work with you to define a solution. i, unfourtunately, have to deal with a lot of situations where people in our organisation go off and find a solution to their problem and then come to us and say "we've bought this, now make it work...". it's extremely frustrating! ensure your i.t. department has the right resources to correctly provide and maintain an internet facing server - particularly as once it's live you'll come to depend on it. now, onto something a bit more helpful... you've mentioned using a windows server - iis7 on 2008 server has the capability to offer ftp services over an ssl encrypted channel, would be worth investigating that to see if it can offer you the functionality you need. hope this helps! :)
 
You could setup a dropbox website over https, thats the first thing that I would look in to for this situation.

Google for opensource file management, it'll be a combination of a webpage and an SQL backend probably.
 
still think ftp is the best way and i think your reasons for not using dont stand up. I know lots of companies which have no issues with it.
 
Filevista looks like the closest to what I was looking for, it gets a bit costly for lots of users though.

Some of the open source stuff looks like it might do the job though - will investigate further.

Google Apps and Dropbox are out - it needs to live on our network and for us to have complete control.
 
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