sharing pdfs with WebDAV

sozialraumeuropa · October 12, 2009

We would like to share PDFs in our research group. To do so, we've already installed WebDAV. Unfortunately we're still not able to open documents, which are saved on some other group member's pc. How could we view PDFs that are saved at a different pc?

thanks

sean · October 12, 2009

For group collaboration with files, you'll want to use Zotero file storage rather than WebDAV.

felwert · October 16, 2009

But what if I don’t want that? 100MB aren’t much for a collection of scanned documents. And our institution would not be able to pay for extra storage. So is it technically possible to use WebDAV for group storage?

sean · October 16, 2009

So is it technically possible to use WebDAV for group storage?

At present, no.

felwert · October 16, 2009

Thanks for the information.

That’s kind of sad, I thought our institution could switch to using Zotero instead of our homebrew shared bibliography. So I’ll keep an eye on it and hope that it will be implemented in the future.

benjaminhkb · November 13, 2009

Could you tell us if Zotero doesn't allow WebDAV in groups in order to make them pay a small contribution (which is OK when we see the quality of Zotero) or because of a technical difficulty?

dstillman · November 13, 2009

The latter. We'd like to support groups via WebDAV eventually, but our first priority is creating the best user experience for the most users, which we could really only do by building our own storage solution (backed by an enterprise-class data store). Any group WebDAV functionality would have significant limitations vs. an integrated solution.

alexuw · November 14, 2009

somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but when the server source is released it will be possible to run the whole show in house. The question has come up before, some people want to run their own servers, for a variety of reasons.

charpent · November 14, 2009

I beg to differ with Sean...

I've setup a system allowing both bibliography and PDF sharing : Bibliographies are in Group libraries, and the relevant PDFs are stored in WebDAV tree ; the relevant bibliography entries carry a link to the PDF, created by displaying the WebDAV copy of the PDF file in the Acrobat plugin within Firefox, then using the "Add link to current page" option of the "Add an attachment" menu.

It's a bit of a hassle : you have to keep a Firefox tab pointed to the WebDAV directory and open the relevant file in a new tab befor attaching them, you have to have some way to write to the WebDAV tree (this is *broken* in Vista, I don't know about Windows 7), but it gets the job done.

A very much preferred option would be, of course, an intramural server : I can't setup such a solution in another institution who would go ballistic at the though of having a research instrument stored extra-murally...

Is there any timetable for server release ?