Various entities need to share data among team members working on the same project without investing in specialized server software. To address this need, an existing standard file server is used to host data for sharing among the team. The file server has not been customized to share the data for the particular application. A user creates a special folder for a project at a user specified location on the file server. Data associated with the project is converted to files and stored in a structure of folders used by the file server to represent the data that is shared. Each client that has subscribed to this shared data synchronizes the data on their local computing device with the data on the file server. Security is provided by using the file server's built-in access controls.