Expanded options for group file syncing (ownership, WebDAV)

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.
  • 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.
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