I have a comment.
I have been urging my confreres to use basecamp and actively looking for other collaborative tools. To little or no avail.
Old-school is real. I can say that much. But the questions old-school types ask is usually based not on price or speed, but on CYA and security.
For CYA, once you upload something then everyone has it and they can criticize it. If there is a mistake somewhere it is visible to everyone forever.
For security, the issue is that fear:"what if this gets into the wrong hands?" "What if it gets into the "right" hands, but at the wrong time?" Consider jobs for clients like government: "What if the media gets hold of this?"
Also, don't underestimate the tendency of people like me to look at all that work in its native file formats like word and AutoCAD and say: "hell if I will put this out there!"
Reading this I know it sounds un-progressive. Fearful, even paranoid. I am being honest. This stuff is people's life's work, their reputation, their self-esteem...and so on and so on. So these are the things people think when collaborative web-based tools come up.
The reason I put this here is just to point out that your PR task would seem to me to be reassuring the bosses that it is "safe." Look at legislation and IP precedent. Tell us exactly what protects us.
Nice job, Woobiusers. Especially on the pricing. Good luck.
I think part of the way forward on this is to realise that you don't actually have that control, even today.
We touched on this in our Be2Camp North presentation: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/1509410 (it's about 20 minutes long - there are a bunch of other presentations in the same stream, after ours).
When you send a file to someone, anyone, you are trusting that person with your file. They can send it on to anyone else they want. They can burn it to a CD. They can print it out and leave it lying around. They can show it to someone at the wrong time. Etc. When people need to send a file to someone, they will - no matter what barriers you put in their way. If you put barriers, they will always go around them some way, either by burning a CD, sending an email, or printing it out.
The more disorganised your modes of communications, the more likely that is to happen by mistake rather than intentionally. And the more disorganised and ad-hoc your communications the least visibility you have over all this.
To your colleagues, I would say, perhaps bluntly, that the control they feel they have is an illusion. There is no control, once you send a file to someone else - there is only trust. The nearest thing to control you might have is visibility - to be able to at least see who downloaded what when. And that, you can get through the Woobius audit log.
You can develop an Access Management system (or integrate with a COTS).
You can watermark the files with timestamp and username. Thus allowing you to track who let the documents go into the wild.
Based on Meta data, you can restrict access to different files and restrict the client's ability to display those documents.
None of those tasks are trivial and all of them can be worked around.
You aren't building a military grade secure system, so, perhaps what you are doing is good enough.
I'd start with Access Management and add visibility controls on documents.
How about a mobile client with a limited browsing capability for AutoCAD? That way, the customer is never giving away the direct access to the file, and can even restrict users to see only parts of the design.
This is a great point. Personal comfort is a huge part of social processes and interactions. The internet has particular obstacles to overcome in this area.
