Sharing files across multiple platforms

August 19, 2011 3:53 PM

Sharing pdfs with multiple users on iPhone and Android platforms. Dropbox the only option?

My company is looking to share price lists (which are constantly updated and stored on our network share) with all the sales people. These are scans with an abundance of pictures in them. We have a mix of iPhones and Androids and we're trying to find the easiest, most cost effective way to do this.

We thought about just making a simple share and shortcutting it on their home screens, but we don't want to create/maintain that many VPN users (which would be the obvious answer for mobile).

We thought about a simple ftp site, but we don't really want to take the time to build that out and maintain it.

Dropbox seems like the obvious answer, but I've got questions I cannot seem to find elsewhere.

1) Could I use one account which all the users would login on their respective phones. Is there a limit to this? Can I have 30-40 apps all logged into the same account?

1) To avoid tampering with the file structure could I create two accounts, #1 which shares out the folder to #2 (without permission to write), and then have everybody login to #2?


thanks!

posted by lattiboy to computers & internet (5 answers total)

You could set up an Amazon S3 bucket containing your price lists, using a mobile device's web browser to access the PDF.

S3 will let you set up graduated (e.g. read-only, read-and-write, write-only etc.) access to the bucket (and individual lists) with one account, or any number of accounts.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:10 PM on August 19, 2011

Dropbox allows you to create public links to files in your folder. I've used this to distribute large files to customers on a one-off basis, and it seems to work fine. The URL is hashed and obfuscated, and I think the file has to live in the Public folder to work. I also just across this useful little trick for hosting a website in your Public folder:

http://wiki.dropbox.com/TipsAndTricks/HostWebsites

You could use GoogleDocs as well, I bet.
posted by jquinby at 4:10 PM on August 19, 2011

There's a limit to how much data you can transfer from a public account in a certain time period. I ran into that when i was sharing mp3s with mine. I doubt pdfs will run into that.

They could share accounts, but since accounts are free, i don't see why you would bother.

If you share a folder with everyone, then anybody can do whatever they want to it, they don't have fine grained rights control like that.
posted by empath at 4:42 PM on August 19, 2011

It literally takes 15 minutes to set up an ftp site, btw, and there are a million places that will host an ftp site for you very cheaply. It would be faster to setup ftp than try to get this working with drop box, quite honestly.
posted by empath at 4:43 PM on August 19, 2011

4shared.com
google docs
posted by jander03 at 1:59 PM on August 20, 2011