Microsoft SharePoint has moved forward and replaced the traditional file server, unfortunately due to the way it has modernized the way of working it no longer supports traditional file transfer protocols such as SFTP or FTP. For finance and healthcare companies this can remove key functionality to securely send and receive files.
This is where Couchdrop can help. Couchdrop is a cloud SFTP/FTP server that enables you to use your SharePoint as backend storage. Couchdrop enables you to access specific sites or paths via SFTP, FTP and other means (email, API, SCP, Rsync, secure web portal). You can also create users who have granular access and permissions to specific locations within your SharePoint storage.
Couchdrop also supports HIPAA through business associate agreements (BAA) and offers other functionality such as a white-labelled product, bring your own domain and the ability to have your own dedicated infrastructure.
See below on how to configure SFTP or FTP with SharePoint Online.
Create an account
Navigate to Couchdrop to register
Connect SharePoint
We will connect to SharePoint for this guide. Head to your storage tab and select SharePoint. You can specifically enter a document library URL, otherwise you can leave it blank to connect all your document libraries, you can filter user access to specific libraries by their root path later on.
Create users
You can create users here. You have the ability to set granular permissions, firewall to restrict IP access, limit protocol access (disable FTP) and restrict the user to a specific folder as their root directory.
SFTP/FTP
Now you can SFTP/FTP into your Microsoft storage by connecting to sftp.couchdrop.io and using the user credentials above. Below we have used a terminal but standard SFTP / FTP clients such as CyberDuck or FileZilla are supported.
For other guides and more detailed walkthroughs check out community.couchdrop.io or reach out to the Couchdrop team.
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