Our organisation has been using syncthing sporadically and it has been something of a disaster. There is only one IT guy who knows how to get a share working on a new members machine, and when he is not available, its not possible to sync. Add to this the issue that most people dont have syncthing starting up automatically (because they dont know how to do this on a mac), we have the situation that out of say 50 people, only 1 is online with syncthing running. The next issue, is if you want access to one of the company shares, how to find someone to get it. You need to ask many people to find someone who has the share, and then you add their device Id, they add your device ID, but nothing happens. No share. Unless the IT guru steps in to fix it.
The solution.
What we are thinking of is to setup a pair of syncthing servers. These will be always available, unlike users. However, if someone adds one of the servers device IDs, how would the server “allow” them to see it? would the IT guy need to login to the two servers each day, to check for sharing requests, or is there some other way to manage it?
I saw one blog where it shows you can make the servers web UI available externally, and password protect it. Or perhaps there is a way to send an email notification if someone tires to add the servers device ID? Or perhaps the new user sends an email to an admin, along with their device Id, and the admin logs intot he server, and does the link from the other end?
This is indeed a confusing disaster and also it is not clear who is responsible for your data. Especially with 50+ people I would not want everyone sharing company data as they wish, at least in my company this would have serious consequences.
If I understand this correctly since there is no central point you also don’t have any backups of the shared data - so a server with Syncthing would make sense. Depending on the network size I would only share each computer with the server and not with each other.
Connecting the devices is not enough, you also need to share folders.
Have you seen the extensive documentation?
Thanks uok for the response. Agreed, sharing folders once devices are connected is a big stumbling block for our org. I have spent many hours reading the docs, its still a hit and miss process which frequently none of us can get working. The IT guy always can, but we have not been able to track down the magic sequence he does. Anway, the crux is if we do get servers setup, how to share folders with it, in that there is no real person on those servers. Would someone need to check them daily for sync requests or similar?
You invert the process, by starting off by adding the folder on the server and then sharing it with people from within the server, and ask users to accept.