WesFiles - A Web Based Unified Document Management System
Jan 31st, 2008 by ravishan
Over the past several years, we have seen tremendous growth in the need for centralized document storage, fueled by the increased use of the web for information dissemination as well as increase in the use of rich media (high quality images, music and digitized videos) in teaching and research. As we progressed, we accommodated these needs based on the best technologies available at the time of implementation and taking into consideration the need to support Windows, Mac, and UNIX operating systems. Today, the total central storage being used is over 20 Terabytes and we are not done!
Unfortunately, the central storage that we provide has gotten too fractured. As a result, it is confusing to the users, especially faculty members who have to deal with three to five different document storage areas. Many times, accessing them requires different front end programs and the access control and security are also not consistent.
WesFiles is an attempt to centralize all the different document stores into one system. There are many advantages to storing your documents in WesFiles beyond the centralization.
- Easy network access to all your documents from anywhere.
- Easy web access. You simply have to connect to https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu and provide your credentials to access all your documents
- WesFiles system can also be mounted on your desktop so it appears as though it is another disk on your computer
- Ease of collaboration - you can set the access control for any document yourself; you can also share documents with anyone who doesn’t even have a Wesleyan email account.
- You don’t have to worry about backing up your files because WesFiles is backed up for you on a regular basis.
- WesFiles lends itself to extensions easily. For example, we have written a dropbox function that the faculty can set up in WesFiles.
- We will soon be integrating WesFiles with Blackboard so documents stored in WesFiles can be easily referenced in Blackboard.
- WesFiles provides a document workflow engine that is very powerful.
We converted all the student accounts to WesFiles in mid-January and are in the process of converting the faculty members over to WesFiles. What this simply means is that the faculty members and students who had document storage on various locations such as Dragon and Condor have their relevant content moved to WesFiles. The Academic Computing Managers, Desktop Support Staff and the ITS Helpdesk are helping both with the transfer and answer any questions on this subject.
We have decided to wait until 2008 summer to move administrative users to the new system. The reason for this is because of some changes that are anticipated in desktop support for administrative users as well as the complexity involved in transferring their shared spaces from Dragon to WesFiles.
For more details on WesFiles, please visit the WesFiles Blog at: http://wesfiles.blogs.wesleyan.edu
I think wesfiles is a great accomplishment as well, though there is one particular feature that bothers me. When I tried recently to update a folder through the webfiles host (at https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/xythoswfs/webui) it seems as though I could only add individual files at a time. Is there a way from my personal mac to connect to the server like I used to do for afp://dragon etc so I can drop whole files full of documents at a time. Also, please link us to the tutorial! I asked an IMS employee to help me and he didn’t even have a clue!
http://wesfiles.blogs.wesleyan.edu/mapping-the-xythos-drive-manually/
Check it out jeber.
Is it possible to SSH and/or SCP into the file system? Often the website and the Java app are unstable, and it is much easier to see from the terminal if the transfer is actually working. Additionally, it’s much more convenient.