How well does DropBox fit into a SmallBusiness environment?

Question

For a small business with 10 users and a single server, it seems as though DropBox may be a good option to act as a file server. It would certainly remove some dependencies the server which would be nice, plus provide backups...

My question is, how well will DropBox fit into this type of environment? Are there any gotchas that should be considered? What about security? Does DropBox encrypt the files? How can you control who gets to what?

Answer 1

I use dropbox with one other co-worker for exchanging files. I really like it. Anytime he updates something, I get a small pop-up notification that lets me know. It cuts down on communication, since I can grab files immediately after they're ready without him having to call me, etc. Furthermore, both of us may be working remotely from time to time, and using dropbox makes it easy to always have access to our file-directory, rather than relying on a local in-office server.

If I had to grade it, I'd give it two thumbs up.

Super User Archive:

• What interesting types of things can dropbox be used for?

Answer 2

I'm familiar with organizations that have very successfully used DropBox in a business environment, however it was with the users distributed across locations rather than in one office.

DropBox just promised LAN syncing in an upcoming version, which should be a big boost for the small business use case.

Answer 3

I have been using DropBox since its beta, and it has proven to be a life saver time and time again.

Though I don't own a small business, and have mostly using it as a student, it seems like it can scale very well. It is easy to share files not just between computers but people as well. It's a very polished service and has never failed on me.

I do believe they encrypt their files as well. EDIT: Just looked, they don't. Woops.

Answer 4

We use Dropbox in our small design studio. One of the big pluses is support for Linux and OS X as well as Windows, so I can have it running on my Linux development boxes and the designers have it on their Macs, no problem.

What we've done is simply create a shared "company" folder, and then created subfolders with each person's name. Technically, everyone will have access to the contents of everyone else's folder at all times, but we're not passing around secrets.

Encryption is not part of the bargain, that's the one feature Dropbox still lacks that I wish it had.

Answer 5

A colleague started using Dropbox recently for sharing some assets; it's gone pretty well, and I haven't had any problems with it at all.

Apparently the files are encrypted on the server, and you can assigned per-folder permissions, but neither of these have come up for our limited usage as yet.

Answer 6

With approximately 10-12 people the dropbox seemed to be an answer the problem we were experiencing with speed regarding deadlines and collaboration on projects since some of our employees telecommute from differing states. However, after a test run it has turned out to be quite the nightmare for more reasons than I can begin to explain: loss of documents, outages, and perhaps worst of all the support staff (while some are quite professional, others have no idea how to deal with customers and are very rude and condescending). I love the concept, however, for my needs, I found the product is not quite as developed for business than it is for casual use.