A Litigation Support Provider Automated Its Daily Production Handoff on Files.com and Shut Down Microsoft IIS FTP

A US litigation support provider delivers technology-enabled services to law firms, corporations, insurers, and courts: court reporting and depositions, record retrieval, process service, and legal staffing. The business runs on work product. Transcripts and records move constantly between the people who produce them and the people who need them, and a workforce of well over a thousand keeps that pipeline moving. Two production teams in different time zones share that pipeline: one team processes each day's work, and the other picks it up, modifies it, and sends it back. Every business day, files have to cross between the two.

The Server That Survived the First Migration

That handoff ran on a self-hosted Microsoft IIS FTP site. The first team uploaded the day's files into dated inbox folders. The second downloaded them, made its changes, and returned the results through an outbox. The structure that kept the exchange orderly, a folder tree organized by year, month, and day, was created by hand. Somebody built it, day after day, because the day's work had nowhere to land until they did. The hard part of replacing the server was never the users. It was the structure they worked inside.

That put two standing costs on a single daily workflow. IT had to keep a self-hosted FTP server alive, because two production teams in two time zones depended on it every morning. And it had to spend recurring administrative time on folder scaffolding: work that produced nothing, existed only so the exchange could keep its shape, and never went away.

The server had already outlived one migration. The company had retired its self-hosted SFTP infrastructure onto Files.com, but the IIS site kept running, because the workflow on it was live daily production across time zones, and a platform that merely hosted the files would have moved the manual folder work rather than removed it.

A Replacement That Had to Run Itself

The Senior System Administrator who owned the server set a clear specification for its replacement. The replacement had to generate the dated inbox and outbox structure on its own, every day, with nobody building it. It had to govern each team's access through permissions. And it had to leave the administrator exactly one recurring task: deciding who gets in.

The company selected Files.com to carry the handoff.

A Deliberately Small Cutover Built on Scheduled Automations

The cutover was scoped tight: just the two teams that actually touch the handoff, and the company provisioned them itself. The Files.com side of the project came down to two pieces of configuration.

The first was a scheduled Files.com Automation configured to create the year/month/day folder tree every day. The structure the teams work inside now exists without anyone creating it, generated by the platform rather than by a person. The second was folder permissions, which decide what each user can reach, assigned once when the user is set up.

The administrator had braced for the automation work to be the painful part of the project. It wasn't.

The Folder Tree Now Builds Itself

With the handoff running on Files.com, the company replaced a server it had to keep alive, and a folder structure it had to build by hand, with an exchange that maintains itself.

• The Microsoft IIS FTP server was shut down. There is no transfer server behind the handoff for IT to host or keep alive.
• The dated folder scaffolding is fully hands-off. Files.com generates the year/month/day tree every day on schedule, and manual folder creation is gone from the workflow.
• The administrator's recurring work dropped to one task: assigning permissions when someone needs access.
• The teams' daily rhythm didn't change. One team uploads, the other downloads, modifies, and returns, exactly as before. The structure underneath is simply no longer anyone's job.