Item: Dropbox Business
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Dropbox Business when clients want to share files with us. It is used on a lawyer by lawyer basis depending on what file-sharing software a client has chosen to implement.
The business problem it addresses is that sometimes clients need to share files with us that are too large to fit into an e-mail (usually e-mails get rejected if the file is over 20 gigabytes, although this varies slightly by an organization).

Pros and Cons

File sharing between a client and their external professionals.
Implicitly results in the user creating a cleaned-up set of data files, since you don't want to share non-material and personal files with other business users.

More appropriate for small organizations than large organizations.
It is intended for file-sharing - not a formal document management system that a law firm or an accounting firm would typically use.

Return on Investment

Positive ROI because the web platform allows us to accommodate the client's software choices - clients would be annoyed if we told them we couldn't use the software they had selected.
Positive ROI because effective file sharing makes us more efficient, which keeps our total fees and invoices down.

Alternatives Considered

Box, MS SharePoint, Merrill DatasiteOne and HighQ Collaborate

So there are a variety of other file sharing and collaboration options out there:

I find Dropbox Business pretty similar to Box. They seem to be about the same in terms of quality.
MS SharePoint is a more sophisticated option. It seems to take more effort by the organization to set up on the front end but is more powerful.
As a law firm, we use HighQ to share files with clients on a permanent extranet. HighQ has security that is more appropriate when sizeable corporate law firms are the ones sharing the data.
Finally, I think the M&A data room sites, such as Merrill DatasiteOne, tend to work better for large mergers and acquisition transactions. One outstanding feature about those sites is that they produce indexes of all of the documents on the site, which works well for due diligence tracking.

My overall rating for Dropbox Business is nine because I like it - it just works. The reason it did not get 10 is that it is a multi-industry type solution, so it does not have some of the specific features that may be required in particular industries or use cases.

Key Insights

Do you think Dropbox Business delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Dropbox Business's feature set?

Yes

Did Dropbox Business live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Dropbox Business go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Dropbox Business again?

Yes

Other Software Used

MS SharePoint, Google Drive, Zoom

Likelihood to Recommend

Dropbox Business is well suited for smaller organizations sharing files with their outside professionals and consultants. For example, I have a small (50 employee) energy client that uses Dropbox Business to share land documents with me as their outside lawyer. It would be cumbersome to share these files by e-mail because:

the file size may be too large for e-mail;
the files may change from time to time - it is easier to send me a log-in, and then I can find the most current documents on the Dropbox Business site; and
the file structure on Dropbox Business tends to be more organized than a large volume of files just attached to an e-mail.

Dropbox for Business - Hard Not to Like It!

Overall Satisfaction with Dropbox Business