Seeking a document management and file sharing solution for an online client portal

Hi

Late last year our developers created a Members Portal for a clients website (built with WordPress) enabling Members to have a secure area for a discussion forum and crucially, secure document storage and access, and file-sharing. The WordPress plugin chosen for the Portal was WP-Client.

We have a problem though and I wonder if you or anyone can help?

Basically, the solution was supposed to be like Dropbox or Google Drive but within the Portal but with slight differences. The problem is that the current solution we have isnt like either and has various flaws which make it unpopular with most members. It uses free software called kcfinder see http://kcfinder.sunhater.com/ as the basis for the file management systems.

So we are seeking to change the file management system. This system must do the following:

  • Its got to be intuitive e.g. the action open or download must be typical (it is not so in kcfinder you have to right click to download for instance
  • You must be able open an Office document (especially Word, Excel and Powerpoint) online in situ within the portal. Currently in kcfinder you have to download it. 
  •  You must be able to edit it online. Currently you have to download it, open it, edit it, re-upload it and overwrite it.

-          The client uses Sharepoint (I think thats part of MS Office 365) and wants to be able to I think drag docs from there straight into the Portal file management system (I think at the moment they have to download a file from Sharepoint to their hard drive and then upload to kcfinder.

We are currently investigating using a WP plugin for Google Drive https://wp-glogin.com/drive/ and Google Apps for work to create some sort of file management system that meets the requirements.

However having loaded the plugin, the developer has found that two issues remain that so far defeat us:

-          Firstly, and this seems to be applicable to using Google Drive outside the portal as well as in it - you cant edit Word docs online in Google Drive without creating a Google Doc. This means we get duplicate docs which we dont want and theyre in the wrong format. We want Word and no duplication. The members/users dont have time to delete and change the format back to Word. I guess the same applies to other Office docs.

-          Second, apparently you cant create a new folder in Google Drive in the portal.

So my question for this forum is really what can you suggest, either as a fix to the Google Drive solution or is there a totally different plugin or set up we can use? Ideally it should be Office-based or friendly since most of our users use Microsoft Office.

The other proviso is that it must be affordable. We/client cannot afford the $10 per user per month that some systems charge. The attractiveness of the Google option is not only the wide use of Google Docs (notwithstanding the fact that you can't open Word in GD instead it creates a duplicate in GD) but the fact that the plugin is cheap.

Thanks in anticipation. 

April 6th, 2015 3:56pm

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