To provide areas of filestore which staff can use to share documents, or work in other cooperative ways such as joint authorship, contributory data archives, etc.
Shared filestore is managed by School Computing Officers, who will liaise with ISS when necessary.
An area of shared filestore is accessible to all the staff who have been given access to it by the manager (who is normally the local Computing Officer – see below). However, nobody outside that group (except ISS Systems Managers) has access.
A shared filestore is normally configured ("mapped") once, (often by the Computing Officer for the user), and thereafter it is automatically connected at login.
Therefore, users are often unaware that they are actually using this service: they simply refer to "Drive J" or "Drive M", etc – however the filestore has been set up.
Access is determined by the manager of the share (your local Computing Officer/IT Support staff) and will in most cases by limited to other project, team and local department members. In addition ISS Systems Administrators and the systems which provide the service have access via the built in server 'Administrator and 'System' accounts.' Access for these accounts should not be changed as doing so will interfere with system backups.
Disabling Administrator access also causes more general problems for the Filestore management systems, and therefore ISS staff may reinstate default permissions without notice.
Quotas are negotiated by the Computing Officer with ISS.
Filescreens are a Windows feature which ISS have implemented on the Shared Filestore. Filescreens allow us to prevent files with specified extensions from being saved there. We do this in order to channel the correct filetypes to the appropriate filestores (ISS provide filestores for various purposes).
All enquiries about filescreening should be directed in the first instance to your local School Computing Officer.
Other prohibited filetypes
BKF, BT5, BT6, BWA, BWI, BWS, BWT, CDI, CSO, DAA, DMF, DMG, DVD, GHO, GHS, HDD, IMA, IMG, IMZ, ISO, ISZ, MDF, MRIMG, NRG, OMG, PARTIMG, PARTIMG.BZ2, PARTIMG.GZ, PDI, PQI, PVS, TIB, UDIF, UIF, V2I, VDI, VFD, VHD, VMDK, WIM,
ISS's Turret fileservers provide this service; hence the service is sometimes informally referred to as "the Turrets". (See also "Drive J" etc, above.)