Backup / Collaboration for a creative team?

August 26, 2016 8:37 AM

What online backup and collaboration solution should a small ad agency use?

It's for a small advertising agency, mostly design and creative work, so any design-related functionality would be great, like being able to get client approvals, comments and markup online.
I'm looking at various solutions, dropbox, google apps, etc, but there's a lot out there and I don't know how to sort them.

posted by signal to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

I am pretty sure that InVision is the visuals-focused collab tool that advertises on some podcasts that I like. I know nothing about it except that they claim to be good at collaborating over design and graphics and they give money to people who make thinks that I like.
posted by sparklemotion at 9:36 AM on August 26, 2016

I just used InVision for the first time on the customer side, and it's excellent.

To answer an online backup question, you probably need to post more information about what files you have, how big, what operating systems/platforms, where the files are located, whether the files are centralized, etc.
posted by cnc at 12:21 PM on August 26, 2016

Response by poster: Lots of files, some largeish (say 100 MB), mostly on macs, located in an office, not centralized.
posted by signal at 1:11 PM on August 26, 2016

You want to separate the archival/backup use cases and the collaboration/sharing use cases. Here's what we use, in a slightly different scenario, if that helps:

• For backup, backblaze or crashplan or a similar backup solution on every machine will do the job.
• For sharing and collaboration of files, google drive is fine (especially if you don't have Microsoft Office), otherwise Dropbox (+ orangedox) works well enough, Box.net if you want more control/notification over sharing. Github doesn't support large assets unfortunately.
• For realtime collaboration on designs/creative works - Invision works great. You may also have access to some collab tools in your Adobe subscription if you have one.
• For chat/messaging/voice - slack works well and has access controls if you want to share channels with clients.
• For videoconferencing/screen sharing - appear.in is free and works reasonably well, zoom.us is paid but very robust in my experience
• For project management: asana or trello are good, provided you collectively decide over usage conventions.

posted by motdiem2 at 3:08 PM on August 26, 2016