New document sharing for old file servers

Most businesses would like to have a clean, coherent and most of all searchable file sharing and collaboration platform that can deliver readily actionable information to appropriate teams within their operations.

What they often end up with, however, is a mix of available cloud storage services such asBox, Dropbox, SharePoint, and Google Drive, plus a large collection of legacy file servers holding data that is probably useful if only everyone could get at it easily.

Getting round this issue has become a goal for document management platform specialist, Docurated, and the company has now introduced its answer, the File Server Transformation Solution. Providing complete Active Directory/LDAP integration, it transforms legacy file servers and cloud-storage solutions into secure, searchable, and actionable knowledge and file sharing platforms.

The company claims that it not only can provision all the users in a business, but also mirror all of the Active Directory permissions dictating what files can accessed by whom, a task that could take months for an IT department to replicate.

“We took an old file server with years of content and quickly transformed it into a robust knowledge center”

“File servers and shares remain some of the most prevalent content repositories across all enterprises,” said Docurated CEO Alex Gorbansky. “ IT departments seeking to unlock the value of their trapped content by moving to a cloud-based file sharing solution have to manually recreate their entire file and folder structure, permissions settings, and workflow, resulting in massive management overhead and costs.

“That is, until now,” he added. “With Docurated’s File Server Transformation Solution, IT departments can give users the benefits of a rich cloud-based knowledge solution while preserving existing permissions. The whole process requires zero infrastructure change, thereby dramatically reducing cost and drawing more economic value out of existing file shares.”

The company claims to be the only solution that goes beyond basic user level provisioning to provide granular file-level access control and permission mirroring. The Docurated File Server Transformation Solution consists of a lightweight agent that indexes content and reads Active Directory and LDAP permissions.

The Active Directory integration is set up through a simple, guided process and leverages existing identity management systems, allowing it to mirror file system access settings with no extra IT department effort. It automatically inherits all permissions based on existing Active Directory/LDAP settings.

Systems are kept in sync, with changes automatically reflected in Docurated, including auto-provisioning and de-provisioning of users and groups.

This makes it possible to take an old file server holding years of content and transform it quite straightforwardly into a knowledge centre. It is possible to keep existing infrastructure and security settings and give business unit teams, even if they are spread around the world, an important tool with which to find and share valuable information.