Would you like to be able to share files on S3 bucket with other Amazon S3 users? CloudBerry Explorer can help you to do that. With its External bucket feature sharing buckets and files becoming a breeze.
Allowing another Amazon S3 user access your bucket and your files
Let’s assume I would like to share my bucket with the user who’s registered for Amazon S3 under info@cloudberrylab.com email. I will have to select a bucket I want to share and open ACL editor, then I click “Add” button and type the email address in the text box
Click ok to add it. Now you have to provide access rights to your bucket to this account. For our example I will grant the user read/write access to my bucket by checking appropriate checkboxes.
Notice how I also checked “Apply for all subfolders and files" checkbox to make sure correct permissions are propagated to all objects in the bucket. This operation may take some time if you have many files in the bucket.
Now you are ready to share your bucket with the user. All you have now to do is to tell the user the URL of your bucket. This is where Web URL feature comes handy. Right click the bucket and choose “Web URL” option. Now just click copy to clipboard to get the URL that you can send to another user. Here is how it looks like:
https://sharebucket_andy.s3.amazonaws.com/
You can optionally choose HTTPs URL type to make your communication secure.
Now when another user receives the URL she can register it as an external bucket and start sharing files.
Enter the URL of the bucket that you’ve generated on the previous step
The external bucket will appear in the list of other buckets and you can quickly spot it by a green icon with a smiling face:
Security Gateway
CloudBerry Lab is taking this approach a little further and working on the product that will let people not having AWS accounts access files and buckets. Security Gateway is an online service that works on top of the single Amazon S3 account. It allows creating users and sharing certain buckets and folders with them.
Security Gateway will be seamlessly integrated with CloudBerry Explorer and CloudBerry Backup.
As of this writing Security Gateway is still under development but you are welcome to sign-up for beta at http://www.cloudberrylab.com/default.aspx?page=security-gateway
Conclusion
There are numerous ways you can share files on the Internet these days but if you like Amazon S3 and CloudBerry Explorer you can find “External bucket” feature useful. But if you like Amazon S3 you can find CloudBerry Explorer with its “External bucket” feature useful.
If you have more than one Amazon S3 account if you like you can try this scenario yourself.
As always we hope you liked our post and we invite you to download CloudBerry Explorer for Amazon S3 at our website at http://cloudberrylab.com/
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3 comments:
Nice post as for me. I'd like to read a bit more concerning this theme. Thank you for sharing this information.
I have several hundred short .flv or mp4 files to upload. I've hired some freelancers to do it. How do I allow them access to their own bucket, so they may upload, without access to other areas? I then count the number of files uploaded and pay the freelancer.
You should have your freelancers use their own Amazon accounts and grant them access to only the buckets they should have access to. Once the work is done you can revoke the access. Let me know if it helps.
Andy
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