
Dropbox for business - dmourati
http://gigaom.com/2013/11/13/dropbox-launches-business-focused-services/
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rdl
I'm a bit unclear how you can use this in business, since it is effectively
unencrypted. If you go through the trouble of building your own crypto and key
management into every mobile app with a "save to Dropbox" option, you might
saw ell run your own storage infrastructure (or outsource it to s3). If you
don't, you are storing confidential business data with a consumer file storage
company and exposed to insider, compelled disclosure, third party attack, or
implementation bugs.

~~~
eps
People are lazy and ignorant. Just look at how many businesses default to
Gmail without giving it _any_ thought whatsoever.

~~~
cLeEOGPw
I'm looking forward to changing from gmail to a more secure mail service,
maybe you could recommend something that's not US based and, at least as of
currently known, secure and possibly encrypted, similar to how lavabit was?

~~~
Ntrails
Given that, as I understand it, lavabit deleted all of it's user data when the
government won (and it will always win) - I am not sure picking such a service
is a solid business idea?

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anseljh
<rant>

The copyright lawyer in me is irritated by the "(C) Om Malik" legend on the
photo of a slide. Yes, photographers can get copyrights in the original
elements of their photos, but this is just a picture of a someone else's slide
from where he was sitting.

>:-(

</rant>

~~~
dmourati
I took the mark as more of a: "look, I was there for the announcement!"

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singular
Not to moan on every single dropbox thread but...

I wonder whether the issues I (and others) encountered with large numbers of
files would be a lot more likely to occur with a business account where that
number of files is quite likely to occur, esp. with the bigger package deals
(dropbox basically broke unrecoverably, no longer syncing anything and
overwriting files as I worked on them at ~300k files.)

This has been a known issue for a couple of years already with no fix on the
horizon, weird they'd leave that alone but push the kind of account that would
trigger the problem.

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ksec
I didn't realize this before, but has Dropbox for Business always been $795 /
year at unlimited capacity?

This sounds like a very good deal to me.

~~~
bowlofpetunias
It's a very annoying deal to me. Both the one year commitment and the minimum
number of users feel like the kind of outdated package deals of mobile
providers to me, where you pay for stuff you don't and may never need.

Been in the start-up situation twice where it's only 3 of us at the start and
no idea how long we have to survive on a minimal budget.

Of all the services we used, Dropbox by far asks for the biggest and
completely blind upfront commitment.

~~~
coreyja
Honest question, what did your team of 3 need that required you to pay
$795/year? What were you storing in it?

~~~
bowlofpetunias
That's the point. We don't.

We just need the service Dropbox offers (and preferably from Dropbox, since
that is so ubiquitous it makes it easy to use with third parties and integrate
with other services).

But we can have either individual accounts (which doesn't scale, and doesn't
have the convenient team-features) or commit to the whole $795/year and hope
we'll soon get to the point where the benefits outweigh the costs.

Dropbox for Business is an all-or-nothing package-deal with 3 separate
benefits (features, volume and accounts) which cannot be purchased separately
even though most clients only need one or two in limited quantities. And to
top it off it's an upfront whole year commitment.

It's dramatically different from the pay-per-use proposition of any of the
other SaaS products we use.

I've done the "what do we want to get started" math twice in the past few
years, and Dropbox for Business stands out like a sore thumb.

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kissickas
Sorry to be meta, but was this article translated from a different language or
something? It's quite odd. From the very beginning:

> Dropbox has 4 million business customers. For them it now has a new Dropbox
> for business

That sounded unnatural. Then two weird commas:

> The company, so far was focused on getting attention of individual users and
> small work groups.

> Houston, claimed that a billion files are saved online.

I see that the author founded Gigaom. Maybe he just doesn't have anyone check
his articles before publishing them?

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Digit-Al
I know what you mean. In the last paragraph he writes "If the real service is
as good as the demo (and I have no doubt that it wouldn’t be)", which seems to
suggest he does doubt that it would be (or that he has no idea what he is
talking about).

~~~
kissickas
Ha! Good find. I feel like I remember re-reading that but deciding that it did
mean what he wanted it to mean. Clearly not, now that you point it out.

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EGreg
I never really used DropBox much. That's because I am able to easily have a
script that watches a directory and performa rsync - or better yet, uses git -
to commit to a remote repo. Problem solved.

And you can also have a hook in MacOS that lets you right-click a file and
create a new public link to share for it. Every file in the repo would be
private but when you execute this command it would make a symlink on the
remote repo in a subdirectory of DocumentRoot of nginx. Done.

~~~
DougWebb
How's that work on your phone? Tablet? Windows PC?

I can see getting Windows working; monitoring a directory for changes is
possible, and of course Git is available. I'm not sure if PowerShell is up to
the task, and I'm pretty certain a Batch file couldn't do the monitoring part,
so most likely you'd have to write a console app instead of a script. Hardly
as simple as Dropbox, but doable.

Mobile devices though? That's tougher, I think.

~~~
EGreg
Mobile devices? You just use web viewers to see the files. There are plenty of
them.

Or do you mean being able to access the files offline? For that we have
browser caching of the files and players :)

People could probably package all this nicely into a distributed Dropbox
alernative anyone can host.

Any other questions?

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miomyosky
Not sure what the big advantage of using Dropbox is when you are working with
lots of confidential data or stuff that is competitive in nature. Better to
host on-premises using FileCloud, OwnCloud etc. I wouldn't want to run a
mission critical business relying on Dropbox.

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qhoc
Businesses with existing storage infrastructure can just host themselves using
any Storage as a service model. Syncplicity.com is one good competitor

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tehabe
Am I the only one who thinks that mixing work and private data is a bad idea
even if it encrypted and safe?

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tteam
Dropbox for Business is still a public cloud service. The reality is we live
in information economy where information and intellectual property is a first
order citizens for any business. So storing your organization data to a public
cloud (whether it is dropbox or some other service) is equivalent to giving
keys to your organization's treasure trove. Also Dropbox being a high profile
target, if the service hacked for some reason, it puts your organization data
at risk in inadvertently.

We have built Tonido FileCloud
([http://www.getfilecloud.com](http://www.getfilecloud.com)) to specifically
address this use case where organizations can self host their own Enterprise
File Share and Sync platform.

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imperialdrive
won't bittorrent sync do this and a lot more in another 6 months, for free?

