SysAdmins nightmare: how to share documents in a secure way?

When your workgroup has a need to exchange documents in a secure way, you
are faced with dilemma: is the NFS or Samba right solution? How to track
changes to such documents? What about security? Do you trust your network
(even internal in your company)? Would users be more content using Web
interface?

Deadlines for such projects are often short, and solution has to be flexible
enough to support additional features that will pop up during usage. You
want to have control over your destiny, so you consider Open Source
solutions. However, none of them satisfy all the requirements. Logical
solution is to use one of Open Source projects and extend it to meet our
needs.

The result is Document Manager, document management system with the ability
to check-in/check-out documents, track changes, and support multiple users.
All usual operations (rename, delete, view, edit) are supported while
communicating with secure HTTP servers using SSL.

Management of such system evolved from simple text files to database backend
for users. Additional authorisation modules are developed and supported, and
project evolved from simple exchange of documents used by our workgroup to
workgroup support tool that is used in different environments and countries.

For the benefit of community and to protect changes, this project is
released under GPL. Company which supported additional development didn't
have any problems with it because it needed solution without legal
mumbo-jumbo.

This paper will try to show SysAdmins how to evaluate different Open Source
projects, what to implement as a solution and which part to develop (or
outsource) based on requirements from end-users.