Cloud storage for business?

June 20, 2017 1:20 PM

We're currently using DropBox, but are considering other options. What are the recommended business cloud storage options that allow multiple people to access a file at the same time?

We're currently using DropBox for business for our shared server files, but we're about to move and may need to restructure it (break our accounts out from the group account, which I guess would mean copying all of the files over?). I think the main dropbox sync folder is set up on our physical server currently, and we access everything that way, but I am not 100% sure.

This seems like a good time to look at alternatives - someone suggested Google Drive and Microsoft - do these allow multiple people to access/work on a file at the same time?

Are there any other great solutions out there? We like the ability to easily access our files from home or the office, so being able to access the files from a website would be a plus.

We can definitely talk to our IT guy about this, but I wanted to get some suggestions before I went to him.

posted by needlegrrl to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Dropbox, Box, Microsoft, and Google Drive are the main players in the space. The all allow multiple users to access at once. Google Docs is by far the best option if you want multiple people to be able to edit a doc at once (their collaboration tools really aren't matched yet), but it's really meant for things that were all created in the Google Drive ecosystem (as opposed to uploading Word docs that you then just pull down as files). Dropbox & Box work much more as just folders that everyone can access, though they're both working on collaboration. Microsoft is probably somewhere in between and good if you're really reliant on Office docs already.
posted by brainmouse at 1:30 PM on June 20, 2017

Your requirements are kinda fuzzy, but the one that stands out as potentially troublesome is this:

allow multiple people to access/work on a file at the same time?

Unless I'm wholly wrong, that's not something a syncing tool is going to be able to solve. Some tools tolerate multiple users better than others, but even Microsoft's solution for this (which is SharePoint, not their Dropbox work-alike OneDrive) really only allows one person to write to a given Word or Excel or Powerpoint doc at a time. Others can READ the last version, but not write. Dropbox has traditionally solved this by creating alternate copies with notes about who edited the "conflicted" copy, which leaves the onus on humans to blend those edits.

(It's possible the Office 365 version of Word, e.g., now mimics GoogleDoc's ability to do simultaneous editing, but that would involve working with a cloud-only version of the file and not a sync.)

If what you want to do is share files, then Dropbox for Teams is a good option for you, and probably a better option from a feature perspective than the competitors from Google, Microsoft, or Apple.

If what you want is online collaboration, then maybe you should look into Office 365 and SharePoint, but that'll be more of a "my stuff lives in the cloud" situation than a "files seamlessly sync to my local computer" situation.
posted by uberchet at 1:33 PM on June 20, 2017 [1 favorite]

You can co-author using SharePoint Online. That means you use the full fledged versions of Word, PowerPoint and Excel and multiple people can author the same document at the same time. You can also sync a local copy of a document library to your PC. However, as noted above, SharePoint's primary use is storing files in the cloud. My understanding is that Sync also works on Macs now, where it didn't previously.

I like Google's GSuite fine, but they're very, very simple tools.
posted by cnc at 3:22 PM on June 20, 2017