Wednesday, September 23, 2015
Dropbox’s new team feature makes it a better tool for the workplace
The Verge: Dropbox is launching a team feature that aims to make its file hosting service a better tool for workplace collaboration, the company announced Monday. Existing Dropbox users will soon see a "team" tab on the left-hand menu list that will let you organize groups of employees and share files with those sets of users in a central hub..
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4 comments:
I always thought DropBox was a great way to store photos and files and be able to send then easily to friends and family. I remember in high school we would actually use it for class projects or anything photo related like posters and head shots. Know that DropBox is going in this direction is a very good thing. I definitely see DropBox as being used as a professional tool in the future. Business and education facilities already use it now, but I think this update will help further DropBox's formal process for professional corporations that may have questioned dropbox in the past. I also like that they want to make it better so people can work together and collaboration is very important so it's nice they are focusing on that. However, I wonder in DropBox became global and just another social media website. I wonder what people would do.
Wow this sounds huge. The company I worked at this summer literally had its entire digital life on a Dropbox for Business account, and it was a blessing and a curse. When Dropbox worked, it was awesome, but when something went wrong, it just went wrong without explanation. Files not syncing, transfer rate at 0kb/sec, etc. I would say 80% of the time, it was a great collaborative tool! But the lack of user file permissions and permission hierarchy was definitely a pretty large drawback for us. It sounds like this new update goes part of the way in correcting this missing feature set. It would be great if owner/editor/read permissions were something that were bundled into this new permissions layer, but it doesn't sound like it is. Kind of a bummer considering Dropbox's more corporate nemesis, Box, does all this just fine. On the other hand, I think that Dropbox's desktop client cannot be beat for simplicity & ease of use. I just wish it had a more full feature set, which like I said, I think this update will help partially address.
This is potentially a game changer, but I am not sure what exactly they are changing. Now people will be able to organize their Dropbox into different projects, inviting their team to collaborate on a set group of documents. This is great, but I still don't think it's changing much other than how files are being organized. I have never understood why people use Dropbox for collaborative work rather than Google Docs. After using Dropbox this summer, I realized it can be nice to be able to share any type of file with your team, rather than having to use the google doc formats. Dropbox making their website more collaborative will definitely make it more enticing for people deciding between Google Docs and Dropbox. However, I am still not sure I would choose Dropbox over Google Docs. Google Docs updates in real time, and allows multiple people to be working on the same document at the same time. You can't do this in Dropbox. In fact, if one person has a document open on their computer, others cannot make any changes. In my experience this past summer, this often slowed workflow, as many people needed to be editing a document at once (i.e. expense entries.) If Dropbox really wants my money, they will need to find a way to make their platform truly collaborative. I don't think this cuts it quite yet.
It feels like just yesterday that I was setting up my first drop box account. Hard to believe that now it has completely blown up in the past 8 years with almost 400 million users. That it impressive. However, other companies, like Google, have adopted the idea of file sharing and linking a similar the file sharing capabilities to their preexisting applications, which has attracted many users to away from drop box. This is requiring drop box to push outside the traditional way of file sharing and expand to other applications. The concept that they have created it strong, but I still believe the will have trouble competing again the big companies that have already implement some form of cloud storage into their product line, especially since these big companies can offer their customers large amounts of storage at no cost, while drop box is limited to 2gb. To put this in perspective, I am a student at CMU and receive 5tb for free.
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