Contribute and intranets

[DamianLewis]

Hi,

Contribute exhibits some very stupid "clever behaviour" when used on a typical
corporate network.

Specifically, it is not possible to link to documents stored on a shared
network drive without Contribute uploading the file to the intranet server.

This means that:

1. There needs to be as much storage on the intranet server as there is
storage for documents on the network drive (in this case terabytes!)

2. Any changes made to documents on the network drive are not reflected in the
documents on the intranet.

This makes it impossible to sensibly deploy Contribute for maintaining a
typical corporate intranet where large volumes of documents on shared drives
are managed by many different users.

I suggest that a simple checkbox is provided to the Insert Link dialog that
prevents Contribute from being too clever, and simply inserts the URL specified.

Or is there another solution available that avoids either users or site
editors from having to go through gymnastics to simply link to a local file?

Thanks,

Damian

[DamianLewis]

Can anyone help with this?

My client is getting angry.

Damian

[DamianLewis]

2 months and still no reply!

Does anyone else think this is important?

My client had to set up Samba shares between Unix and Windows boxes to trick
Contribute. That is not necessarily secure, nor elegant.

Please respond.

Damian

[Tom Benjamin]

Well to be honest it sounds like you?ve chosen the wrong tool for your client's
intranet. If you have terabytes of documents (presumably thousands) that all
need to be on the intranet, then I'd consider building some dynamic pages that
read the shares and build web pages based on the file/folder structure.

My experience with a corporate intranet is that users don't want to share all
their documents, so you either create a website that does duplicate the files
they choose to share, or create a custom application that allows clients to
mark some documents as accessible via an intranet.

[DamianLewis]

Tom,

Thanks for the response (where is Macromedia/Adobe when you need them?)

My client is already using Contribute to manage their intranet.

They do not want to expose all documents, as you say.

But they do want the freedom to edit an intranet page and insert a link that
points to a document on the intranet share.

However, Contribute insists on uploading the intranet document to the Web
server instead of just inserting the link.

This wastes bandwidth, and more importantly, storage - everything gets
duplicated. Plus, the Web server version of the document gets out of date
whenever the intranet version is edited.

We ended up mounting the intranet share as a sub-directory of the Web server's
document root and training editors to insert the http:// ref rather than the
file: . That managed to stop its tomfoolery.

But far from satisfactory.

Cheers,

Damian

[swinglowe]

I have just come up against the same thing. We only have a small intranet
written by me in Dreamweaver 2004 mx then 8 and I have wanted to get the users
more involved in editing and sharing ther work for a while. We are only a
small Housing Association and I thought that Contribute sounded perfect.

However, what a fiasco, why does it give you the option to link to a file on
your computer when it doesn't mean that. What it means is that it will take a
copy of the one on your computer (In our case a network drive e.g.
I:\documents\example.xls) copy it to a folder that it doesn't tell you about
(even rename the file) and then make you think that all is well and when people
click on the link on the intranet they think they are looking at the file on
the network share when infact they are looking at a copy sitting on your
intranet.

Dreamweaver doesn't do this you can link them relative to document or root so
why on earth have they done it this way in Contribute without the ability to
over ride the so called feature.

I was excited when I read your post because I thought Ah Ha it is a common
problem and therefore if I read further all will be revealed but it seems like
Adobe are ignoring you.

My sympathies, I hope someone that knows this software reads this because I'm
sure someone worth their salt could provide an answer quite easily. It can't
be as badly written as it looks at first sight.

Good Luck to us both. Lets hope a Guru is watching out there.

PS I think Tom was a bit harsh, your solution did sound quite sound if it
weren't for this FEATURE. Afterall not everyone wants to make everything
dynamic these days.

[DamianLewis]

swinglowe,

Still no joy with a Contribute fix for this.

But, as I mentioned in my last posting, we successfully put in place a
workaround which may work for you:

1. Map a directory from your intranet server to a subdirectory of your Web
server root (not sure how you do this on Windows, but easy under Unix using
mount points and symbolic links)

2. When your users want to link to existing files, tell them to use
Link->Browse To Web Page

3. Click 'Choose' to browse your Web server and select the file in the mapped
subdirectory.

4. Contribute will not attempt to upload the file anywhere, as it is already
on your server (actually your intranet).

This way, the docs can still be updated on the intranet and the Web links will
point to them, not some copy you didn't ask for.

Hope this helps,

Damian

[nowdog]

Damian writes: " Does anyone else think this is important?"
I do. I've been following your thread recently. We're proposing Contribute for
a corp. intranet... it has tons of .pdfs and .docs spread around on various
servers and local drives. That means, of course, tons of links to those files.
You've caused me some concern. I was thinking we'll move the files to the web
server, but ... just maybe, there will be too many of them, as in your case.

BTW, are you guys using Contribute Publishing Server? I'm trying to determine
it's usefulness.

Thinking, thinking... and a bit of sweating too.
Neil

[swinglowe]

Damian

Thanks for that it was helpful but in our case because we are so small (only
have 4 servers) our IIS server is also our data server. What I am
conetemplating today is moving our documents folder to the documents folder on
the intranet as it's less than 15gb. But I'm going to have to read up on the
impact it may have.

Even as a I type this I'm thikning tail wagging the dog.....It's ridiculous.

Dreamweaver 8 has this simple feature, why should I change anything on my
network just to fit in arround this little bit if software thats been written
with such an obvious oversight.

I'm going to try to ring Adobe and if I don't have any success I'm going to
look elsewhere, it's annoying me now.

By the way I don't use publishing server. Sorry Neil. If I get any joy from
Adobe I will pop back and let you know.

R

[swinglowe]

Just got off the phone with Adobe and no joy.

There is a section in Edit\ Preferences\Microsoft Documents that looks like it
was designed to do what we all want but it really doesn't change anything.

I was also advised to try edit preferences file editors and remove winword
from the .doc extension in a vain attempt to make it think that if it can't
edit it there really is no point in making a draft copy, but agin no joy.

Finally I was directed to a document that basically said that contribute has
been designed to make coppies of microsoft files and place them in the
intranets own documents folder even when we just ask it to link to the file.

I have come up with something that I think I may adopt here, it's not perfect
but it may work for you: Go to insert link file on my computer browse the
network drive to the file you want and then select it. Before you click OK
remove the filename and just leave the last \ this way the intranet will open
up the folder and not copy any files.

Not perfect by a long way I know but I think we can work with this for what we
need.

Good luck Damian and the rest of you guys.

R