File Sharing

Next: [Intro]

People working together over the internet often have a need to share files with each other. Many people doing so share documents by attaching them to e-mail messages and sending them to everybody they're working with, but this has a few problems:

• files are often bigger than can be easily accommodated in peoples' email inboxes, causing them to overflow or crash
• virus-infected files can be spread by attaching them to email
• different and conflicting versions of files can easily multiply as revisions are done and redistributed
• files are always "pushed" at all recipients whether they want them or not, which can waste both time and bandwidth and add unnecessary network load

Email wasn't really designed as a file distribution mechanism, and the problems that often emerge are a reflection of that.

File sharing is a better way to do this. With a file sharing setup, there is one central repository that everyone can share access to, and they can upload and download documents as easily as dragging into or out of a folder. Using the webDAV protocol, users can get a very user-friendly method of sharing files that solves all of the problems listed above, and makes the whole thing much easier. Support for this protocol is built into the latest versions of Windows and Mac OSX, and is available for free for systems like Linux, Mac OS 8 and 9, and older versions of Windows.

LiteracyTent provides file sharing space for literacy-related projects as a free service to the field. Use it, and stop clogging up your colleagues' e-mail boxes.

Begin at the Intro page to read about what DAV file sharing is and how it works.

(section last revised 30 January 2004; see Revision History for details)

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