[Zope] Multi-User File/Document Sharing

[J Cameron Cooper]

> Lawyer wants to share documents (Word, Excel) with multiple clients.  
> Thus, the lawyer (admin) needs the ability to upload/download files 
> for multiple client "accounts".  The client only needs to 
> download/upload files associated with their account.
>
> In addition, we would need a "stamp" of the filename, show uploaded 
> (downloaded) it, file size, file type, description, etc.

Zope can take care of most of that with nothing more than a few scripts, 
mostly for playing with permissions. Even that wouldn't be needed if you 
were comfortable with everyone accessing the ZMI (i.e. only doing it 
yourself.)

The only interesting (read: non-trivial) thing will be the activity 
monitoring. If you don't ever pack, I suppose you could just inspect the 
history. Since that's not really an option, you'll have to either 
recreate that or suck it out and save it. Easiest is probably to only 
allow upload and download through a script that does the recording of 
whatever parameters you like.

And since I'm in implementation suggestion mode, you can either have one 
big area for files and simply change the permissions of who gets to see 
what, or have various secured "home" folders. If you want a document to 
commonly go into several of these in a transaction (which is one reading 
of the above), you'll probably want your upload script to copy to both. 
If you only want to be able to deal with multiple spaces, well, nevermind.

Also look into Plone/CMF. You can make document types other than "File" 
and it already has the concept of user spaces. (It'll even generate them 
on user creation.) Plus it has a nice (non-ZMI) interface for your 
document-management tasks.

          --jcc