There are a lot of technologies that we use in the information technology world to get our jobs done. Most of the technologies are very solid and are as old as the internet, and... Did I mention they are old and robust and reliable and... Not being used?
In today's world of non-technical management often doing the technical decision making for their companies, we also find that many times, these technologies go unnoticed in favour of something else that "will get the job done for now because that's what I know." Let's look at one of them : sending data to customers via email.
Most people think email was designed for attachments. Sure, there is a button that allows that in my email client, but there are far better means to perform that specific operation than within email. Email (specifically SMTP, the transfer protocol that is email) was never designed to be a file-transfer protocol - no matter what those people tell you. It is a Simple-Message-Transfer Protocol, in fact. The technology of email is advanced enough that it can, and did adopt attachments very early on in its life - but that doesn't mean it is suitable for transferring large amounts of data. And, as data sizes grow - there are more problems doing it that way.
An Example
Take a 15MB PowerPoint sales presentation that Jeff will send to Mary. Jeff and Mary only know email addresses, and Jeff happily attaches it to the email, and... *poof* it just works, right? Well, Jeff forgot something... This particular "file transfer system" (if we are going to call it that) has some important limitations built in that lots of people don't know about. Jeff may only be able to send 5MB at a time, thanks to his service provider or company. Mary may be allowed to receive 15MB, but her mailbox only has 5MB free. Any file transfer system that has these limitations really limits its use - especially when most of the time, the limits are non-negotiable. Jeff is no more able to convince his ISP to up their limit for a while than Mary is convincing her IT staff to open up her email limits "for now." Especially when resources are at a premium and may not always be available for them. (Yes, even big ISP servers have storage limits!)
Now, when we talk about this, we are going to follow the direction of a business-used protocol. While software or protocols like Torrents may be suited for really large and fast transfers, our example is between one sender and maybe multiple recipients, but not enough to make a torrent really functional. Certainly there wouldn't be enough seeders for Jeff's PowerPoint presentation to speed anything up in the process.
How about FTP?
A File Transfer Protocol is what we want. This protocol allows us to download files and is perfect - just look again at the name of the technology! However, many of the non-technical people we come in contact with don't understand it, either to use it, or administer it. When faced with the Windows FTP client DOS window (that's what they call it!) they sit and stare. It isn't all that simple to use, that is for sure. Then they may be faced with downloading an FTP client. Even then - things aren't always just a click away like email.
Web server?
A web server is just a file transfer server, so would it work? To our knowledge, no ISP's block web traffic, other than for international filtering or proxying or something like that. Your browser connects to my server and asks for something. It sounds like Mary could go to Jeff's site and ask for the presentation... The prerequisites are that both Jeff and Mary have to know how to web browse. I would suggest that if they are working with PowerPoint, they at one time had a chance to use the internet.
Out of the box, most web server's don't have the web programming to do this, but it could be done, (and, it only took us only a weekend from concept to fully secure, functional site!). The problem is that some web coding is often required to do this and most companies don't know how to get started.
We will look at our simple design as an example in part 2...