File Sharing Strategies for Intranet Owners

Intranets can be great places to provide links to important documents. This guide explores options for ensuring your file storage strategy is supportive of your internal processes.

Stanford Sites Intranet users must use an external service for file sharing PDFs, text documents, presentations, and other documents. 

• Documents shared on an intranet often have internal business processes that are typically better supported by platforms that allow for revisioning and collaborative editing.
• Stanford Sites Intranet allows granular access on a per-page basis. External file sharing services can be used to ensure that your file access is controlled with the same level of precision.
• Internal documents may contain high-risk data, which should never be shared via a webserver.

Considerations

The following are things you will want to consider when selecting where and how to store your files.

Individual use

Does your site visitor need a copy of this for their own use? Templates, brand identity assets, and paper forms are important use cases for providing a file for download.  In these cases, your site visitor needs a copy of an asset in order to make use of it. If there is no value in providing the information in a separate file for individual use, you should consider turning your file into a web page.

Data risk classification level

Your file storage solution needs to be rated for your data's risk classification. 

Access control

If your file should be limited to a smaller audience, your file storage solution needs to support easy maintenance of access and permissions.

Google Shared Drive and OneDrive

Google Shared Drive (GSD) and OneDrive are the most common file storage solutions for intranets.

• Workgroup integration. Using workgroup integration you can match your intranet access to your file storage access and manage permissions entirely in Workgroup Manager. If you have areas of your intranet protected to a smaller group, you can create multiple drives to ensure that the access control matches the access control on the web pages.
• File organization. Unlike a web directory, a shared drive will allow you to organize files into folders.
• Flexibility. Both GSD and OneDrive allows the storage of a wide range of filetypes. 

Learn more about Google Shared Drive

Learn more about OneDrive

Google Drive (My Drive) is not recommended for this use since files stored in this way are owned by an individual, not a group. This can cause issues when the individual changes positions or their account is deactivated.