4.1 Organization Needs

A thorough assessment of your organization’s needs is key to ensuring that Filr meets expectations.

There is no absolute “one size fits all” approach for successful Filr deployments. Each organization has unique requirements, environments, resources, and project management approaches. The following sections present general best practices for ensuring a successful Filr deployment:

4.1.1 Stakeholder Participation Is Key to a Successful Rollout

Stakeholder participation is key to a successful Filr deployment. Plan to involve those in your organization who are responsible for affected systems and services as early in the deployment process as possible.

Include All Functions

Consider involving representatives from as many of the following functions as applicable in your organization:

  • Management

  • User community

  • Server administration

  • Database administration

  • Network administration

  • Directory service administration

  • Security administration

Define and Test Use Case Scenarios

Write up use cases for how the people in your organization will use Filr.

For example:

  • Users accessing and viewing files through the Filr web client

  • Desktop users accessing and synchronizing files using the Filr desktop clients

  • Mobile app users accessing and viewing files

4.1.2 Meeting Organization Branding Requirements

Some organizations have branding requirements for any interfaces that employees and others use.

For information on the branding capabilities of Filr, see Setting Up Site Branding in the Novell Filr 1.0.1 Administration Guide.

4.1.3 Assessing the Business Requirements

Be sure to assess your organization’s business requirements first, then define the technical requirements for meeting the business objectives. Project stakeholder input can be extremely valuable in this process.

  • Discuss what is happening within the organization on the file-access and file-sharing fronts.

  • Identify key business drivers:

    • Is there a need to make corporate data available via mobile devices?

    • Is desktop access required as well?

    • What types of data does the organization need to expose?

    • Are you planning to allow storage and access to personal data?

    • Is there a need to share internally?

    • Is there a need to share externally? If so, are there any policies that apply?

  • Are there compliance and regulatory standards that must be met?