France’s Environment and Energy Management ADEME (Agence de l’Environnement et de la maîtrise de l’énergie), has deployed the open source file sharing solution Pydio (Put Your Data in Orbit ) for its one thousand employees. Implemented in March 2013, the solution now serves as a basis of the Partage ADEME Portal. The agency is also contributing to the project some of the specific developments that were made for integrating Pydio to the existing agency’s system.

ADEME is responsible for the implementation of government policies related to the environment and sustainable development in France.

The agency wanted to deploy Pydio (formely known as Ajaxplorer), developed by French engineers, to replace an internal FTP server and to provide a reliable and secure alternative to a well-known proprietary online file synchronization solution, already used by some of its employees. The employees of ADEME, primarily engineers, are using Pydio for sharing files with their internal teams and external partners.

With Pydio, employees can email password-protected links to attachments of any size that they want to share with their external partners. A system for sharing documents and directories was also set up.

According to ADEME, each user controls itself its own shared space, manage its users as well as its shared directories, without any IT intervention. The latter manages access rights and allocates storage space according to user group and user’ roles. Pydio can be used to manage the lifecycle of documents. The solution is also connected to an open source OpenLDAP directory to centrally manage users and staff movements. Integration with a LDAP directory was not originallly included in Pydio’s source code. ADEME has contributed its related developments in Pydio, according the French news site to CIO Online.

Data secured in France

Pydio is hosted by a French company, to ensure application availability, confidentiality of documents and data backup. Data are hosted in France.

Pydio is based on GlusterFS, Red Hat Storage’s file system. That makes the solution storage hardware agnostic. It also allows to integrate Pydio platform to the existing processes of backup and restoration of ADEME. Pydio was up and running in two months, the agency told CIO-Online.

According to CIO-Online.fr, ADEME invested EUR 21 000 for specific development and maintenance on the first year. The maintenance costs are less than EUR 10 000 a year.

More information:

The Case Study on Slideshare : http://fr.slideshare.net/axeladida/etude-de-cas-ademe-et-pydio

ADEME: http://www.ademe.fr