Joseph L. Casale wrote:
Some form of a webDAV, possibly 'skinned', comes to mind, as shared rights and ACL are well defined and readily supported; Clients in every Linux, OS/X or Windows release in active support [also on my iTouch and related portible devices], so far as I know; server side is trivial; uses the 'universal firewall traversal protocol on TCP/80 (plaintext) and TCP/443 (TLS) ;)
Is it actually called "skinned"? Sounds like what I need...
DAV aka WebDAV is just a protocol built on top of http for reading/writing files with access control and locks, on Linux, the server is typically implemented with apache and mod_dav...
the skinning he was referring to undoubtably revolves around building html/css templates for your webdav 'site' I'd imagine that you'd want to implement a simple web front end for this for casual users to upload/download single files for users who don't want to configure a webdav client.
another somewhat different approach would be to use a wiki like dokuwiki as your file storage. doku has authentication, supports as complex a user/group structure as you care to build, and I believe you can setup a regimented file storage area where different user groups have access to different sets of files. Doing it this way, all user interactions with your file repository would be via web browser.