inflo

Goal

The goal of the project is to create a system for storage and management of files, suitable for corporations and organizations. The main difficulty with existing systems is that they are based on a traditional file system hierarchy. These can become tedious to maintain as the amount of information grows, and often result in unnecessary work and disorganization.

To address this problem we are creating an information management system that will not rely on a traditional file hierarchy, but will instead implement a powerful search engine to locate files. The search engine will find files by searching in files’ names, contents and tags.

The system will be a multi-user system, with users, user groups and different levels of authorization. It will be possible to grant different users and groups different access permissions on the file level.

Furthermore, a user will be able to create own personalized virtual folders. The contents of the virtual folders will be retrieved by the search engine backend, according to search criteria defined for the folders.

The files of the system will be accessible via both a graphical web interface and via an interface to the native file manager of the user’s operating system. The native operating system integration will exist to ease the work with files on a daily basis.

Features

• Find files based on tags and content
• Access your files through different clients
• Create virtual folders based on search criteria
• Control who has access to the files
• Revision control of files

Architechture

Inflo will consist of a backend written in C++ that handles requests from all the frontends and takes care of indexing and searching. The backend will have a REST interface and a WebDAV interface for communication with a variety of different frontends. 

During the project we will create a web frontend in Ruby on Rails that will act as the main way for people to interact with their files, view file and revision info as well as set up virtual folders.

The team

Inflo is being programmed as a part of a project course at Åbo Akademi University in Finland. The team consists of 5 members, all with different backgrounds in system design, programming and business.