Upgrade StorageSynchronization between server instances
Here is a use case scenario that I find very useful if made possible in Zotero...
Researcher Alice from the University of A (UoA) wants to collaborate on a project with researcher Bob from the University of B (UoB) and a researcher Chris from the University of C (UoC). Alice has a Zotero synchronization server at the UoA, Bob at the UoB, and Chris at the UoC. To collaborate on the project, they create a Zotero collection that they are able to sync between themselves, i.e. between Zotero servers at the UoA, UoB, and UoC. They share only the project Zotero collection, and not their whole libraries.
I think people would often want to share one collection at the time, and to be able to do that between multiple Zotero servers, i.e. not necessarily all needs to happen within a single sync server (e.g. the zotero.org sync server).
Would it be possible to implement this in Zotero?
Researcher Alice from the University of A (UoA) wants to collaborate on a project with researcher Bob from the University of B (UoB) and a researcher Chris from the University of C (UoC). Alice has a Zotero synchronization server at the UoA, Bob at the UoB, and Chris at the UoC. To collaborate on the project, they create a Zotero collection that they are able to sync between themselves, i.e. between Zotero servers at the UoA, UoB, and UoC. They share only the project Zotero collection, and not their whole libraries.
I think people would often want to share one collection at the time, and to be able to do that between multiple Zotero servers, i.e. not necessarily all needs to happen within a single sync server (e.g. the zotero.org sync server).
Would it be possible to implement this in Zotero?
If you want to have shared library that anyone can access, you can use the server provided by Zotero.
Notice that the point of my post is not to discuss a policy at the UoA and how its IT department should go about it. The point is that in the proposed scenario there are 3 sides, each having its own Zotero server, and that they want to share a Zotero collection.
I know that the zotero.org server can be used, which can be seen from my original post. The scenario is about federation, and not about having everything done through a single central server.
1) servers talking to one another (who manages the connections)
or
2) allowing people outside of UoA to have accounts for the UoA server so that Zotero clients can sync there directly.
I do not see a way to implement either of these without the UoA it department having to manage this. Or do you have some other idea of how this would work?
The short answer is: It almost certainly won't happen in Zotero.
Note that Zotero doesn't even support syncing to an UoA server. The server code is open, but syncing Zotero with a local server requires a fair amount of work and a patched version of the client as well. You can find some documentation in this post: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/zotero-dev/p5Mlvnw3nXY
Now, it may be possible to extend this so that you can use multiple servers (though, like mronkko, I suspect that'd be quite hard to do), but Zotero staff almost certainly won't work on that and if you or anyone else were to release a modified version of the software that _does_ allow that, it probably shouldn't be called Zotero (Zotero is registered as a trademark, so that users can know that everything released as "Zotero" is actually from the team at GMU).
[as a disclaimer, I don't work for Zotero. But I'm familiar enough with their past statements and thinking on this to be confident that this pretty much represents the official line as well].