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Dropbox for Business

dropboxatwork.com

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Re: Dropbox for Business

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's $15/user for unlimited storage. Google Apps is $5/user for 30GB for each user, and then you have to start buying additional storage with "licenses"[1] which brings the price a little closer to Dropbox if you have a lot of data. I only use a Google Apps account so I don't know how well the clients work with multiple accounts (private Gmail and Apps). Maybe Dropbox will handle it better? Obviously, Google Ap…

I believe Google pools the storage. Office 365 does the same thing. My org manages many thousands of people each with 10GB of OneDrive space. We allocate big users as much as 200GB of space without even looking at the allocation ,because most user needs are very light.

Google does not currently pool the storage, but will move to that model in coming quarters.

Re: Dropbox for Business

#72

Why use this when there are options like bitcasa - 1TB at $10/month? Another plus is they offer a real external drive that doesnt duplicate data. https://www.bitcasa.com/pricing Disclosure: I am a happy bitcasa customer.

And apparently they support linux. I mighty actually switch to them from gdrive.

Re: Dropbox for Business

#73

DropBox really shines when it comes to the capabilities of their client. I installed Box from few months ago at work, and used it to share a few screencasts that I was working on > 200MBs per file about 10 files. I got home and fired up the home machine...For the next five minutes the internet connection was jammed. Turns out you cannot do a selective sync of only certain folders. This would be a very basic use case…

I might be alone here, but I actually really prefer Box to Dropbox even though I do not use the desktop sync tool very often (though I've tried it). I'm sure the free 50GB I've gotten skews my opinion. For a college student like me on the kind of budget I have, knowing 50GB from Box will never go away versus getting maybe 10GB for free only temporarily at Dropbox makes a big difference. It's useful to have that kind of space for school, work, or just family sharing.

FWIW, I've never really had any issues with it being bogged down even when using the desktop sync tool. So your mileage probably will vary.

Re: Dropbox for Business

#74

Dropbox has a scaling problem. Not from a technical point of view but from a usage point of view especially when we talk enterprise. Dropbox is great for small teams or personal accounts. As long as there are very few owners of the files stored there. The problems starts to arise when larger groups of people use it as a place to store files. At that point it basically looses it's value namely because its no longer po…

This is just a new version of the network share that many companies have had in place for years. The standard computer setup at a company might include for example a T: drive where all employees are told to store their files. Usually this was intended as a way to allow collaboration on documents, as well as IT not having to backup individual computers. The network share will usually have various levels of organization depending on who is working in any particular folders. Not saying it isn't a problem that could use solving, but it's not new to Dropbox.

Re: Dropbox for Business

#75
post #9

Does $180/user/year seem excessively high to anyone else?

As a business expense it seems like a no-brainer, especially with features oriented around security like remote wiping, account transferring and more detailed logs.

As a business expense for a 50+ person company, that's over $9000 a year. That doesn't seem like a no-brainer, especially when Google will give me Apps (including Drive) for $50/year/person.

Re: Dropbox for Business

#76
post #2

I wonder how the collaboration inside of applications works. Is there going to be a new API for integration?

From what I can see there, that is a general windows overlay and not an intergration into Office, which would be much more ugly and afaik would not leak outside the window. So I guess it goes a bit like: DB watch files, find pid of process editing them (PowerPoint w/e) and they overlay a window.

Re: Dropbox for Business

#77

DropBox really shines when it comes to the capabilities of their client. I installed Box from few months ago at work, and used it to share a few screencasts that I was working on > 200MBs per file about 10 files. I got home and fired up the home machine...For the next five minutes the internet connection was jammed. Turns out you cannot do a selective sync of only certain folders. This would be a very basic use case…

I agree that the killer feature with Dropbox is that it "just works". I jumped on the 50GB Mac mobile app special from Box.net a few months ago and upon trying to use their Box Sync desktop client I found that it just doesn't work. Bogged the machine down, was never able to properly sync files. I've got 50GB at Box.net that I don't know what to do with and I definitely wasn't moved to the category of a prospective co…

It really frustrates me that there are separate clients that do the same thing, but talk to a different domain. If these companies cared about their customers they would be putting together an open source spec for cloud syncing so that we could just pick our favorite clients and tie them to the individual accounts.

Re: Dropbox for Business

#78

Dropbox has a scaling problem. Not from a technical point of view but from a usage point of view especially when we talk enterprise. Dropbox is great for small teams or personal accounts. As long as there are very few owners of the files stored there. The problems starts to arise when larger groups of people use it as a place to store files. At that point it basically looses it's value namely because its no longer po…

This is just a new version of the network share that many companies have had in place for years. The standard computer setup at a company might include for example a T: drive where all employees are told to store their files. Usually this was intended as a way to allow collaboration on documents, as well as IT not having to backup individual computers. The network share will usually have various levels of organizatio…

Oh I agree completely. My point was exactly that they didn't solve this problem and that I think it's worth solving. Otherwise it doesn't "deserve" to be in the enterprise world IMHO.

Dropbox even have most of the necessary meta data and have the potential to solve it via their large app install base.

Re: Dropbox for Business

#79

DropBox really shines when it comes to the capabilities of their client. I installed Box from few months ago at work, and used it to share a few screencasts that I was working on > 200MBs per file about 10 files. I got home and fired up the home machine...For the next five minutes the internet connection was jammed. Turns out you cannot do a selective sync of only certain folders. This would be a very basic use case…

I might be alone here, but I actually really prefer Box to Dropbox even though I do not use the desktop sync tool very often (though I've tried it). I'm sure the free 50GB I've gotten skews my opinion. For a college student like me on the kind of budget I have, knowing 50GB from Box will never go away versus getting maybe 10GB for free only temporarily at Dropbox makes a big difference. It's useful to have that kind…

I'm upto 18.9gb permanently free on my Dropbox account. They periodically do promotions that give you permanent space. After using Dropbox for 5-6 years I'm still only using 62% of that space. For just storing documents, code and the odd file I'm sharing with people I've had no issue with the space available.

Last year there was the 'great space race' where they were promoting to students, I think I got 8gb for that. (https://www.dropbox.com/help/390/en)

Before that there was a beta for testing out their new photo system. Which gave a max of 5gb free. (It appears this is still available to give you upto 3gb https://www.dropbox.com/help/287/en)

Re: Dropbox for Business

#80
One of the most important features to the company I work for is being able to share sub-folders within a shared folder. Without it, you have to completely give up hierarchical organization of your data.

This feature is still missing as far as I can tell.

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