TOPIC:

Currently, File Manager access is limited to three roles only (not including the webmaster). There needs to be a way for ALL Club Officers to be able to use File Manager in order to enable them to effectively perform their duties.

We have enough electronic documents that flow back and forth across email, or are saved in laptops, or elsewhere. There is really no single location for a club to efficiently manage their documents.

Being limited three roles means that other club officers are unable to upload documents. Please remove this restriction.

I absolutely agree. Every member of the board should have the ability to post files to the file server, and perhaps committee members. This particular field needs to be more flexible.

File servers facilitate organized communication, one of the tenets of Toastmasters. I have been working in technical writing and documentation for ten years, and I am the new VPE of my club. I understand the rule of least privilege and the rule of three, but this particular category cannot have this restriction without risking major problems in communication.

Free file servers like Google Docs and MS OneDrive don’t work well for teams. They split documents between the documents you upload and those everyone else shares with you. The documents are on different screens, depending on who you are, and there are no common file folders.

When our board had to choose, they chose the President, VPE, and VPPR. The Secretary, who should be the document librarian, was left out along with the Treasurer, who can't maintain the budget spreadsheet on the file server. Web site administrator Brian calls Toastmasters an open organization (see "File Manager - Subdirectories" thread). However, restricting file management access to only three actually hinders open communication.

If you were a team manager of six people, you would of course give yourself access. So, how would you feel if four of your six team members only had "read" access to the team's files?

Liam Hickey
VPE, Club 681947

For all of the reasons stated in this post it would be extremely helpful for all of our officers to have Access Rights to File Manager. I see that this post is over 3 years old, but I'm wondering if this feature is on the FTH team's backlog or if there's any possible way it could be implemented. Can we get a reply from anyone on the FTH development team?

Thanks,
Kevin Taylor
President, State Farm Landmark Club #7057
sflandmark.toastmastersclubs.org

You have a choice of 3 officers that will not be changed.

I concur w/ Brian. FreeToastHost is not intended to be a full-on file repository. You need to be selective about who and what you upload.

What is also likely is that at some point in the far future we will start automatically deleting files that have not been accessed in a certain amount of time (1 year?) in order to conserve server disk space. We are just not going to keep "dead files" forever. We will start clearing out the dead wood.

We do try to provide a reasonably good feature set and user experience, but we also will insist on certain things as functional "guardrails", enforced retention time of data, privacy measures, etc., etc.