I hope someone can give me some advice or at least point me in a direction to solve a very real business/security problem.

I'm working with DNN 6.02.03 - and I am just dipping my toes in the DNN waters - so please excuse my lack of even the most basic knowledge of where to go.

I have a set of files, both pdf and xls, that need to be made available to registered users ONLY for download. Our previous (and current) website uses a login screen that then passes the user to a page that contained links to the files stored in a directory. The problem is that the page with the links itself - and the directories containing them, are not password or login protected. So... anybody can login once and add the page to "favorites" and bypass the login in the future, or email a link directly to one of the files to an unregistered user and they can easily download the file. -- don't ask. I'm currently trying to move this website inside DNN but while I can visualize what I want to get, I don't really know how to get from here to there. Any help would be appreciated. These files contain extremely sensitive information and have to be better protected than that.

These files are for a group of maybe 50 major categories, each having the same 2 sub-categories, and each subcategory having maybe 5 files in them (current information and previous information) that are updated with new "current" files monthly.

I thought some module (I don't even know which would work best) in combination with an internal directory hierarchy (i.e each Cat1 having 2 subdirectories of subcat1 and subcat2). Then, a display of 3 drop-downs and 2 "download" buttons. When the user selects a Category in the first drop-down, the other two dropdowns auto-populate with the complete directory contents for their repective sub-directories - in reverse order of date (i.e. the "current" document becomes the default entry that displays, but the previous versions are also available via the drop-down). Then maintenance would be as simple as adding or deleting items to the directories and letting the module auto-gather them at execution. It would be even better if the first drop-down could auto-populate the categories alphabetically by reading the list of category directories - so maybe a three-tiered hierarchy with a "main" folder, "cat" subfolders, and then subcat folders under each of them.

Anybody have any ideas, guidance, direction, suggestions? This is critical and I need to get a resolution asap-est. Thanks in advance to everyone.

-Rick

I think you should solve at least part of your problem by implementing user roles. The roles approach provides great bit of control who can access what files. Lets say you have a role Clerk with some documents that need to be accessed only by the this role. So I would create a page listing those documents and restrict this page to be accessible only by Clerk group members.