TechKings4U

Dropbox has always been a popular service with and small businesses, not least because it offers a fully-featured 2GB service free.

That’s not much space by today’s standards, but there are easy ways to boost it, with Dropbox giving away additional storage when you use specific features. Meanwhile, its Dropbox for Business product means it can scale up to suit larger companies too. Plans start at $795 per year for five users with a pooled 1TB of space, and scale up at $125 per additional user. Usage can be monitored and managed from a central console.

Simplicity has always been Dropbox’s biggest strength. An easy-to-setup client is installed on every PC, Mac or Linux desktop being used by one of your end users – the licence is per-user, not per system – and a special ‘dropbox’ folder is placed on each hard drive.

Files saved or dropped in the dropbox are automatically synchronised across all systems connected to the same account, not to mention a folder, accessible through a web browser, stored on Dropbox’s own servers. It’s now also possible to set individual dropbox clients to sync selectively, so that you don’t automatically copy every addition to a growing library of media onto the capacity-constrained Ultrabook you use on the move.

A recent update has seen Dropbox’s system tray applet transformed, so that it now provides an at-a-glance view of files which have recently been added or changed, plus instant access to your files in the local Dropbox folder or on the Dropbox website.

However, most things you need to do with Dropbox can be done just by right-clicking on files and sub-folders within the Dropbox folder. Right-click on a file, for instance, and select Dropbox > View Previous Versions, and you can easily restore older versions of a file with a click. It’s possible to delete files from your dropbox by dragging them to the recycle bin, but if you do so by mistake it’s not an issue. The browser-based interface allows for rapid restorations.

Dropbox’s other key advantage is the ease and efficiency of sharing. Files and folders can be shared with other Dropbox users through email invitations, and once shared the files will synchronise automatically, with notifications when another user adds or changes the file. You can share files on the website or by right-clicking on the file in the Dropbox folder, and you can now share recently added files very quickly using the system tray applet, which also allows you to accept or reject an invitation to join a folder at a click. Files will synchronise across a LAN as well as the Internet, helping to keep business bandwidth costs low. Non-Dropbox users can also be given access to files through a web link.

All these features make Dropbox incredibly useful, and for many smaller businesses the free 2GB option could be enough. You can access files from tablets and phones using iOS, Android, Blackberry and Kindle Fire apps, and even upload photos and videos direct. Currently, Dropbox’s biggest limitation is the lack of any built-in apps to preview or edit Office documents, though preview facilities will arrive with a forthcoming update, currently being trialled. In the meantime, many mobile apps, including QuickOffice and Documents 2 Go, will open and save documents directly to and from a Dropbox account. More effective tools to organise and share photos through albums are also on their way.

One big concern may be security. Files are stored using 256-bit AES encryption and the service uses SSL for data transfer, while the actual data is held on Amazon’s S3 servers, with high security and multiple levels of redundancy. However, after embarrassing security lapses in 2011 and the theft of customer email addresses in 2012, confidence in Dropbox has been shaken. To fix this, Dropbox has improved its internal monitoring and now offers optional two-factor authentication, using a code delivered via SMS to authorise new connections. If you’re storing business-critical information, two-factor authentication is a must.

Dropbox won’t leave you hanging around. Our test files took only 27 minutes to upload and 17 minutes to download, while edited files had changes copies across in under 90 seconds. Dropbox might not have the features of Box.net or the clever integration of SkyDrive and Google Drive, but it’s simple and extremely effective, particularly when it comes to collaboration with other Dropbox users. Dropbox still does what it does extremely well, and it’s unmatched for simple, hassle-free file-synchronisation and sharing across multiple systems and multiple users. However, the capacity of the free service now seems meagre in comparison to the Microsoft and Google competition, and it struggles to match their paid services for features or value for money. It’s still the most streamlined service, but no longer necessarily the best.

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