File Sharing over Internet

[vince.]

Is it possible to have users access their folders over the internet (http)?

My company has about 200 customers, each with folders of documents and photos. We currently host their photos on Dropbox, but would like to keep everything in house going forward, especially for their documents, which can contain SSN and other secure information.

Is there some kind of solution where they would access our Lion Server via files.company.com, log in using their username/password set up in Open Directory and see their folders, and maybe even view their photo folders in some kind of gallery format?

Am I asking for too much?

 

[mrbash]

Vpn

No, this is pretty reasonable.

You can use VPN to create a secure network to your intranet over the public internet.

My experience with VPN in Snow Leopard Server was quite bad, but I do know there are some commercial alternatives. Lion Server probably suffers from the same faults as Snow Leopard server when it comes to VPN, so you might want to check out some other alternatives.

Is it possible to have users access their folders over the internet (http)?

My company has about 200 customers, each with folders of documents and photos. We currently host their photos on Dropbox, but would like to keep everything in house going forward, especially for their documents, which can contain SSN and other secure information.

Is there some kind of solution where they would access our Lion Server via files.company.com, log in using their username/password set up in Open Directory and see their folders, and maybe even view their photo folders in some kind of gallery format?

Am I asking for too much?

 

[vince.]

No, this is pretty reasonable.

You can use VPN to create a secure network to your intranet over the public internet.

My experience with VPN in Snow Leopard Server was quite bad, but I do know there are some commercial alternatives. Lion Server probably suffers from the same faults as Snow Leopard server when it comes to VPN, so you might want to check out some other alternatives.

Thank you for the reply. I'd like to avoid VPN as I'm looking for the 'easiest' from the customer's perspective. The ideal solution would have the customer log in to a website and access the files/folders under their name.
http://files.company.com/ -- this would give them a login screen type of page

http://files.comany.com/johndoe/ - would be dropbox-esque in that they see what files are in their folders and can view/download them from there (with the photos displaying as a gallery).

 

[rwwest7]

http://www.Serv-U.com/

 

[DustinT]

If you setup each of these customers with a limited account on your server they would each have a home folder. Then you'd just need Apache to provide access to their web-folder online after authentication. It would take some digging around but it should be possible and secure. I suspect it could even be done for free if you can code even a little bit.

 

[mrbash]

webDAV

You might also consider webDAV. That is built into Lion Server

 

[ChrisA]

...
Is there some kind of solution where they would access our Lion Server via files.company.com, log in using their username/password set up in Open Directory and see their folders, ...

Run a web server. That's all you need. Apache can do that (after some work in the configuration file)

Also you can set up an FTP server to do about the same think.

People have been doing this for at least 20 years

 

[rwwest7]

Serv-U FTP server is hands down the simplest and best solution for doing this I've seen. I don't know about on the Mac side, but it fully integrates into AD where when someone logs in from home their FTP directory is their home drive as per AD.

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You don't want people accessing their files directly via something like webdav. You want to force them to transfer the files to local storage...edit...then re upload.