Dropbox & Egnyte for Business File Sharing

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?