Dropbox - Collaborative storage for Distributed Workforce
February 12, 2016
Dropbox - Collaborative storage for Distributed Workforce
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Dropbox
Dropbox has been a shared storage solution for our virtual team members. It's an essential tool for collaboration across state and country borders, and has created a seamless workflow for the designers working across the country. In the past we've used Dropbox as a storage and collaboration solution to work concurrently on iterations of a project, as well as distribute the final project to our printers, trainers, and international partners. The different levels of user allow for easy (and limited) access to people across all needs of integration, including external freelance designers and trainers.
- Dropbox retains the ability to roll back a couple generations for a file, this is important if you have an error saving over old files. (This has saved me several times.)
- Syncing up to Dropbox on a variety of computers makes the workflow clear and simple across laptops and desktops, when I am switching from Mac to PC to test compatibility, I know that the files I need are updated in real time between both synced computers. This also makes working with dropbox easy as your computer sees it more like a hard drive.
- Dropbox allows for users to be easily turned on and off, so as participants come and go, you can easily manage the accessibility so there is no gaps in protecting your files.
- Sharing files with our printers, partners, and delivery team is easy as sending a link.
- The interface via the web is very minimal, perhaps even overly simplified for some users. Abbreviations for contributors are signified by a 2 letter abbreviation. Finding some of the levels of ownership for folders can be slow going.
- Syncing up a new system, depending on the size of the files, can take forever. Also the syncing of files on a computer that has been in sleep mode can slow performance on the machine.
- It's allowed for a low cost solution to provide file access to outside partners without having an expensive server setup.
- It wasn't as integrated as we'd like with our salesforce platform, so we recently switched the workflow over to box.com
- box.com
We switched over to box because of some integration tools we wanted for Salesforce, and to have a platform that could be better utilized by others outside of our design and production team. We found that box has better usability for our users that aren't as fluent in computers. Box and Dropbox are pretty well matched for the sake of the single user though, and I use both in my freelance business.