Link server based documents to website

Question

I'm building a website which will be client facing.

I am making a page that will give all clients (users) access to our marketing documents. These will be PDF's, Word and Excel documents.

1. How can I link the document to the website and give them the option to download it? Will I have to import each and every document to the solution?

2. Is there a way that I can just link the div/form within the page to one of our networked drives? So that all documents within this folder on the driver will automatically link and update on the website? And whenever a document is added or deleted, it will be added or deleted on the website?

Number 2 would make document management SO much easier as I (developer) won't have to manage the documents and upload and delete every 5 minutes!

Answer 1

How can I link the document to the website and give them the option to download it?

The same way you link to anything else. With an <a> element.

Will I have to import each and every document to the solution?

Yes. Although not necessarily manually.

Is there a way that I can just link the div/form within the page to one of our networked drives?

Browsers make it between very hard and impossible to link to local filesystems from websites, and your clients probably don't have access to your LAN fileshares anyway.

So that all documents within this folder on the driver will automatically link and update on the website? And whenever a document is added or deleted, it will be added or deleted on the website?

You can write software that will mirror the documents. Rsync will do most of it for you (although you'll need something else to present the links to the client). You can use something like Cron to run it on a timer.

Alternatively, you could give your webserver direct access to your LAN (this is a bad idea from a security point of view).