Related CategoriesChallenge Entry Appliance | Consumer | Content Mgmnt & Collab Online Learning Appliance Suite: iFolder componentNovell's iFolder component of my online learning suite -- simple and secure file collaboration Description
iFolder A standalone Virtual Appliance and/or part of the Online Learning Appliance Suite (OLAS) by Farren Constable, May 18, 2006 Novell's iFolder is one of those products that few people fully grasp until they have used it. Soon after they start using it, most people adopt a "how did I ever live without this?" attitude. This text from the ifolder.com web site is a good summary of what iFolder is: ---------- Sponsored by Novell, the iFolder project is built on the Mono/.Net framework to integrate seamlessly into existing desktop environments. The iFolder 3.0 Server was released as an open source project in early 2006. They continue to offer it as an enterprise-grade component in their Open Enterprise Server where, when integrated with Novell's eDirectory, it is an extremely powerful system. For all the details on the iFolder project, visit www.ifolder.com. While this iFolder server could very easily stand alone and be extremely useful, I consider it to be one component of my Online Learning Appliance Suite (OLAS). Please read the "Online Learning Appliance Suite info.txt" file for more information. The iFolder component of the OLAS is provided for the safe and effective distribution of files between the teacher and students, as well as between students for collaborative projects. Each user has control over who they share their iFolders with and what rights each user has to the iFolders. Here's how iFolder works: users download and install the iFolder client. It's available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. The client will monitor the contents of any number of local folders on the user's system. When files in an iFolder are modified, the iFolder client synchronizes those changes to the iFolder server. The client is also monitoring the server for changes in files - perhaps caused by changes uploaded from another computer - and syncs those changes down to the local hard drive. Thus, files in iFolders are kept synchronized between any number of computers while still keeping them local to each computer and available for use offline. Since the files are also stored on the iFolder server (this appliance), they can be accessed via a web browser interface. So, if you find yourself needing access to your files from some computer that isn't yours, you simply log into the server with a browser and access them remotely. Finally, with iFolder 3.0, users are allowed to share their own iFolders with other users of the iFolder system. User 'A' can pick one or more of his iFolders and share them with user 'B', and they can also specify the level of rights other users have. This feature is what makes iFolder a great team collaboration system and thus ideal for an online learning system. Teachers can push files out to all students by using a shared folder. Students can share their work folders back to the teacher. Students can also share files between themselves for team collaboration. Part of the beauty of iFolder is that all the files remain local and are available even when the computer is offline. All of the synchronizing takes place in the background and is quite transparent to the users. This iFolder Server is built on Open SuSE 10.0 from opensuse.org. The root password is 'teach'. Specific instructions can be found at the www.ifolder.com web site. But, in general, you would log into the admin console and create accounts. Then, you would download and install the iFolder client on one or more workstations. Once the client is up, you connect to the iFolder server and then you can turn any existing folder into a synced iFolder by right-clicking on the folder and choosing "convert to iFolder" (at least in Windows). At that point, the local client will start to sync files to the server. I have chosen to NOT include the clients in the VM because they and their dependencies are constantly being updated. Instead, simply go to www.ifolder.com and download the latest clients. Be sure to get the client for the open source server and NOT for the older, closed source server. Simply power up the VM, and once it is at a login prompt, you are ready to connect with either a browser or with clients. You may need to log in a root and run the 'ifconfig' command to find out what IP address the VM was given from your DHCP server. Then, point your browser to that IP address as described above. Enjoy! Last updated: 06/05/2006 Operating system: Open SuSE 10.0 Applications installed: VMware Tools installed: Yes
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