Dropbox is your next shared drive

Dropbox is what today’s business technology is all about. It’s today’s “shared drive” – and it rocks. It’s simple, easy-to-use and is transparent to getting work done.

Here’s a quick intro and how we use it to store and share files with clients and team members.

What is Dropbox?

Here’s a quick blurb from www.getdropbox.com…

Put your files into your Dropbox on one computer, and they’ll be instantly available on any of your other computers that you’ve installed Dropbox on (Windows, Mac, and Linux too!). Because a copy of your files are stored on Dropbox’s secure servers, you can also access them from any computer or mobile device using the Dropbox website.

The beauty is that Dropbox keeps everything in sync – so if you put a file into the special Dropbox folder on your work PC, it magically shows up on your home laptop.

Forge3 + Dropbox

Before Dropbox, we manually emailed or posted client proposals, signed contracts, PDFs and other documents. It was a mess to maintain, and got in the way more than it helped. Plus, it required our technical know-how of using FTP, working with servers, etc. It’s not a good way to go.

Enter Dropbox. We now post all client files directly to Dropbox. Clean and simple. If a client needs to send a bunch of pictures for a website, they add them to Dropbox and we get them immediately. No more clogged emails. No more hassle. It just works.

Integrated and Seamless

Dropbox is a simple solution that gets out of the way. There’s a also great little program that you can install on your PC or Mac that creates a special Dropbox folder that looks just like the other folders on your computer. The Dropbox magic is that anything you put in that folder automatically gets synced to Dropbox – and your clients, other computers, etc. There’s even an iPhone app to access your files on the go.

Everything is password protected, and you choose who sees what.

Pricing

We’re using the free account which allows up to 2GB of storage. Other plans are available, including 100GBs for $19.99/month.

About the author

Jeff Teschke is an entrepreneur - always looking for "a better way." His experience ranges from helping small start-ups create their first website, to developing the world's first mobile scavenger hunt game campaign for Microsoft and Sprite. When not helping others forge ahead, he enjoys creating new solutions, flying airplanes and jammin' on the piano.

Comments

2 Responses to “Dropbox is your next shared drive”

• Kevin Guyton says:

  November 18, 2009 at 9:23 pm

  OK… you have me hooked on DropBox. Great overview overview, Jeff. I have been looking for an elegant solution to quickly move files between Mac / PC / remote work PC without fiddling with USB drives and this is it. Love the ability to selectively grant access to folders, which it appears that you’re doing with your client docs.

  Reply
  • Jeff Teschke says:

    November 18, 2009 at 9:33 pm

    Yes, Dropbox rocks. The beauty is that it stays out of the way – and just works. Simple. Effective.

    The iPhone app is a nice touch, as well.

    Thanks for the comment!

    Reply