<b>Little background:</b> One of my company's clients wants the ability to upload files via the web application I built for them. Technically, that's not hard to do, but from a sales standpoint, considering all the security risks involved, the professional/expected way to do this is non trivial. There are other things involved wrt to this particular case being non trivial. Problem is, the damn Sales guy didn't ask me before telling the client it was trivial. So, i'm stuck between misguided expectations of the client and delivering professional document mgmt. ugh. I need to give them a proposal next week of their options. <b>Question:</b> I'm not really up on whats available on the web. There's got to be a web service for this already that we can purchase or subscribe to. What I want to do is write the user interface for uploading/downloading but the files seamlessly go to someone else's server to manage, such that it doesn't seem like you've left my application at all. Imagine something similar to having a shopping cart that you write, but the actual credit card transaction is seamlessly handled by a third party. thx for any input. Even if you know of a file upload service that requires going to their site, let me know, as often times these website have a business class solution that might work for me.
.NET and SQL Server but that shouldn't really matter, as the solution I'm looking for the files are uploaded to a 3rd party and I never touch them. I'm not interested in managing file uploads at a cheap price. I'll give the client 2 proposals: one using the 3rd party solution (if it exists); the other being fully managed by us...but at a significately different price point than option one.
oh, don't get me started. this is a Fortune 500 company with a full blown doc mgmt system. I always try to convince such clients to use their own system. This is the first time a client (a dept within a huge company) insists on their relatively small custom app doing file management. suffice it to say: I've made the argument.
I am out of the web programming world, mostly 'cuz I do more administration now. Being still a web dude, I find many services already doing the things that could solve problems that are way too easy and make so much sense to just use instead of building them yourself. Either way, you could email companies like www.putfile.com and www.yousendit.com to see if they have an API or a back-end way to reach their servers, while using their business-like options. You also have to take into consideration virus-scanning and such things. Other than that, you're bound to do it on your own. I couldn't think of a different way other than using our own. I've written a few apps that were NEVER used because they were too easy for upper management to use, they forgot about them. Everytime we built something cool, they wanted EXTRA features that they saw in other applications and threw ours away... to time wasted... Do you mind updating us whence the proposal is accepted?
cool thx. I'll call those sites and if anyone can think of others, let me know. As for the "proposal", note this is just one side feature of the app. I'm telling the client they don't want it...just use your corporate doc mgmt system. Our overall app is too esoteric for their being a generic tool. However, this file upload feature is a waste of their money. But they want the proposal nonetheless. Fine! Not like I can argue...it's money in our pocket...but it is just so stupid.
