For different projects I have been using some of the following document sharing tools:
- DropBox. This allows you to have a directory that is shared between different users. Advantage: on Windows this just looks like a network drive and you can easily copy files from and to the drop box directory. Disadvantages: just files. Also it looks for windows as a local disk so by default dragging means “move” instead of “copy”. Site: http://www.dropbox.com/.
- Wiki-type environments. I have experience with PmWiki (http://www.pmwiki.org) and MediaWiki (http://www.mediawiki.org). Advantage: good support for HTML presentation of rich text. Disadvantage: somewhat complicated to setup and to secure; file upload facilities may be limited depending on the hosting environment.
- Live.com. Microsofts sharing environment. Nice online editing facilities of Word documents.
- My current favorite: sites.google.com. Clean and well-thought through. Has most of the facilities I need. Easily shared with just the people you want to share it with. Limits: 20 GB files, and 100 GB per site; I had to park some of the larger data files somewhere else.
I use DropBox, but there's one minor (?) annoyance for me. I don't want to rearrange my filing system to accommodate DropBox, so I leave my files where they are and symlink the folders (Linux) or put a junction (Windows) in the DropBox folder. This works fine on Linux, and works fine for downloads on Windows, but when I change a file on Windows the change is not automatically uploaded to the DropBox server. I have to remember to exit and restart DropBox. Other than that, I give DropBox four stars (out of four).
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