a comparison of the usage and experience of a file sharing system with different operation policies
There are many kinds of file sharing systems used for various pur-poses in the world. At our University, we use a commercial product called Proself as our file sharing system. Proself has been set up under two different operation policies in our university. One is to provide an alternative to the practice of attaching files to e-mail messages in the e-mail system for our whole university. The other is to promote file sharing between specific groups such as laboratories, departments, and so on in one small campus. We have been operating two separate systems for about one year, and analyzed the usage to understand the differences between how these file-sharing systems are used. We found that there are similar and different characteristics of usage in the two file sharing systems. The ratios of users against the potential users, the months actively used, file types uploaded and downloaded, and login time pattern over the course of a week are different between two systems. The login time pattern for a day is similar between two systems. JPG and PDF files are frequently transferred in the systems, but the order is different. Our analysis illustrates the difference of practical usage and gives us useful information to operate them in the future.
file sharing attached file e-mail analysis file usage