A David Creation

I’ve been using Dropbox for over a year now, and it was one of the best moves I made in 2011. I’ve converted almost all my clients to using Dropbox to share marketing files, pictures, designs, and budgets with me as well. I’ve even trained a few contractors on how to us Dropbox on their iPhones out in the field. Mobile Dropbox is a great way to share files about pending, sold, scheduled, and completed jobs. I also encourage contractors to take pictures: before, during and after shots and store them right on your mobile Dropbox App. Then someone from the office can, within seconds, pull up the pictures off the shared Dropbox and post them on a website, blog, or social media site. It makes sharing a piece of cake! It cuts down on emailing file attachments and waiting for those large files to upload/download. Rather than me explaining it, go to the Dropbox home page and watch their simple 2 min video on how it works. One final thing about Dropbox, if you forgot to send an estimate to a client that you promised before the weekend, no problem. As long as you get use to saving your files in Dropbox, you login to any computer or your Smartphone, find the estimate and email it with a note to your client. It is like having an Exchange Server (files anyways) at your finger tips! (Think of Dropbox as replacing your My Documents on a PC. It looks the same and works the same…it saves a copy on your computer and “in the clouds”)

Until recently Dropbox was used mainly for single users. In other words, if you used it for business, you’d have to setup an account for every employee. Now Dropbox has created a Team plan that makes it perfect for any size business. Plans start at $795 per year for a minimum of 5 users and 350GB of storage. Extra space and users are available for additional fees. A single user is only around $120 a year, or $10 a month, but they are limited to 50GB for that price range. So if you want your entire office files in the clouds, the Dropbox for the entire team is the way to go.

Egnyte, is a competitor of Dropbox. I have not used Egnyte personally, but know of a few businesses who use it and are very happy with the results. It has a few more added features than Dropbox and was built for small business users (with more than 1 employee), not individuals. Their best plan seems to be about $45 a month with a 1TB storage plan. Egnyte also has mobile apps, just like Dropbox. So all and all, if you are are small and want to just share a small amount of files, less than 50GB, stick with Dropbox. If you want your entire office files in the clouds, my guess is Egnyte would be the way to go.

Let me know what you all use. Pros and Cons to your file sharing in the clouds?