Expanded options for group file syncing (ownership, WebDAV)

noksagt · September 15, 2009

From http://www.zotero.org/support/file_sync:

You can also sync group files.

Great!

Group file storage is associated with the Group owner.

This is tedious, though. I don't want other users to chew through the very limited quota & I also don't think using the obvious work-around (creating a new user to own each new group) is desirable either. Having a per-file owner would make more sense than having the group owner assume all responsibility. Hopefully, this will be improved.

However, I can grant other group members WebDAV accounts & it'd be nice to be able to allow separate WebDAV information for each group. This could complicate the interface a little bit, but no-more-so than the proxy preferences.

dstillman · September 18, 2009

Having a per-file owner would make more sense than having the group owner assume all responsibility.

1) What happens if a person uploads a file to a group and then leaves the group?

2) Per-group ownership allows, for example, an institution to set up groups for different departments, with the storage paid for by the institution rather than the individual users.

3) With per-file ownership it could very easily be too costly for us to provide any free space. At the current free quota, a group of 100 people could store almost 10GB in a per-file owner model (and, for us, that includes potentially significant transfer fees).

As the Storage FAQ notes, our goal is not to turn a profit but simply to allow the service to be self-sustaining.

I also don't think using the obvious work-around (creating a new user to own each new group) is desirable either

No, and it will also be against the storage TOS (which I don't think we've posted yet but will soon).

I can grant other group members WebDAV accounts & it'd be nice to be able to allow separate WebDAV information for each group.

This is something we'd like to provide down the line, but, as I noted earlier on another thread, our first priority at the moment is providing a seamless user experience for group collaboration, which building our own custom storage service (backed by an enterprise-class data store) allows us to do. WebDAV, unfortunately, does not.