
Dropbox for Teams - johns
http://www.dropbox.com/teams
======
zefhous
This is pretty exciting. Great news!

I would love to use this for a number of things I'm involved with, but I am
surprised by the package that is offered.

I'm not saying that what they offer (1 year of 350 GB for $800) is not worth
the price, but I am disappointed that there isn't a smaller package.

My needs for this kind of thing are more like 10-20GB. The team features are
very attractive, but there's no way I am going to sign up for a package that
large.

I'm sure Dropbox has put a lot of thought into the decision though. I'm very
curious about where they are going with this and if they will ever offer a
smaller team account.

Personally I'd love to see a team account somewhere around $10 a month for 10
GB and 5 users. Basically same price as their Pro 50 individual account, but
with 5 users and 1/5th of the capacity.

~~~
cvg
I don't think the price is too bad. It comes out to $13 per seat per month for
a team of 5. Drops to $10 per each additional.

I think this is more an issue of pricing psychology. The price should be
marketed as $65 a month for a team of up to 5, $10 for each additional team
member.

~~~
dave1619
I agree. A better price point would be $50 a month. Even with that I'm not
sure if I would sign up for our team. If there was a step up from free, like
$20 a month for less storage I might do that.

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gst
Although the website mentions that "files are encrypted to military-grade
standards" that doesn't help if secure client-side encryption is missing.

The best encryption doesn't help (me as a user) if I'm not the one in control
of it. And even if I would fully trust Dropbox this does not help, as Dropbox
must still surrender the data if, e.g., requested by law enforcement (which
would not be an issue if the data were encrypted on the client, so that the
user is the only one able to decrypt it).

Using software like encfs inside a Dropbox container does not help either.
Once I start hacking around on such solutions it's easier to just use a
service with client-side encryption. So if anyone from Dropbox is reading
this: Consider this as a "feature request". I absolutely love the way how
Dropbox works, but right now I don't really use it due to this security issue.

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DrJokepu
Most modern operating systems support file system encryption out of the box.
Why can't you just use that?

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StavrosK
Because Dropbox still have your data unencrypted.

~~~
DrJokepu
But he was talking about client-side encryption, wasn't he? That's what I
infer from the first line.

~~~
gst
I meant client-side encryption of data before it is submitted to the server.

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smoody
I've read through dropbox's security PDF and I _still_ have a lingering
question: What prevents employees/intruders from looking at your dropbox files
stored on the server?

As I understand it (and perhaps I'm wrong), your dropbox password is not your
encryption key. The fact that I can change my password and then still have
instant access to all of my data (ie - it is not batch re-encrypted with new
key) all but confirms this, correct? If that's the case, then it implies that,
somewhere on their servers, they store an encryption key for each user (or
_gasp_ a single encryption key for all users).

If that's the case and someone is able to access those keys (employee,
breakin, etc.), then they can decrypt the data for any user.

If this is all true, then this makes the service too risky (for me) for
anything that could be considered medium to high security. I'd prefer it if
the good folks at dropbox offer me the option to provide my own encryption key
that is only known to me and is provided by me each time I want to gain access
to the dropbox files.

~~~
jessriedel
Personally, I don't trust the folks at Dropbox much more than I trust a random
hacker. (No offense, of course. I just don't know them.) It's not even a
matter of a security breach. Can you really be sure that one of their interns
can't gain access?

So I would never put anything more than mildly sensitive on Dropbox unless I
could encrypt it _locally_ at each computer I use before I sent it too them.
Yes, I guess it would be somewhat better than the current situation if they
encrypted it on their system using a key I sent every times I wanted a file,
but I'd still be trusting them to properly destroy the key, etc.

~~~
zaidf
_Personally, I don't trust the folks at Dropbox much more than I trust a
random hacker. (No offense, of course. I just don't know them.) It's not even
a matter of a security breach. Can you really be sure that one of their
interns can't gain access?_

By that logic, you should also not trust the guy who makes your next carry
out. You don't know him after all. For all you know he could be some evil guy
who likes to spit in the customers' orders.

~~~
jessriedel
If you've ever worked in a kitchen, you'd know that you definitely _shouldn't_
trust that your food isn't spit in. It doesn't happen often, but it happens.
Luckily, occasionally eating some spit isn't that big of a deal, and it's
something I accept as part of the the convenience of having food prepared for
me.

On the other hand, if you had very sensitive financial or business info on
Dropbox, then the consequences are much much more akin to having your food
_poisoned_. So then you're question becomes: why aren't I afraid of being
poisoned by my take out? And the answer is that (1) nobody stands to gain from
me being poisoned while they do stand to gain from stealing my financial info,
and (2) the perceived seriousness of poisoning means that many more resources
are put into finding and punishing people who poison (per incident) than
people who steal financial data, so people are strongly discouraged from the
former.

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drpancake
I work at a large corporate. We're not allowed to use Dropbox, but I do and so
do many of my co-workers.

Value + convenience > Consequences of being caught

This concept is great - and no doubt you've thought about what I'm about to
suggest. But how about an on-site managed solution? These IT departments
simply aren't allowed to put stuff in the cloud!

Remember, there's pretty much ubiquitous hate all-round for Sharepoint.

~~~
jasongullickson
I'm experimenting with AeroFS for just this reason. While you do have to talk
to their servers to manage the shares and such, the data is peer-to-peer and
unless you request it, your data doesn't get stored out in "the cloud"
somewhere.

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BvS
Honest question: What's wrong with using the normal Basic, Pro 50 or Pro 100
Accounts with a whole team? Obviously you have to share an account but if the
dat should be available to everyone, what's wrong with that?

~~~
brown9-2
Lack of centralized administration

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hop
If they charged $65/month, rather than $795, I bet they would have 10x more
customers for this. How many people would buy cable if it was $1000/year,
ditto for cell phones, Basecamp, Salesforce, etc. A little pricing psychology
can make a massive difference.

~~~
maukdaddy
It is much easier for business to pay yearly vs. monthly.

~~~
hop
For a smaller company, divying it up per month can help with cash flow.

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swombat
That's a pretty steep price point for small startups that need to watch the
pennies. So if you have 7 active team members who need to save files as well
as read them (quite a lot for a bootstrapping startup), it's still cheaper to
get 7 Pro 50 accounts than to get this.

In fact, given that Dropbox Pro 50 is $100/user/year and this scales up at
$125/user/year, Dropbox Pro 50 remains cheaper forever. So the only reason to
upgrade to this is if you need more than 50GB of team storage.

Bad pricing for startups.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
But excellent pricing for non-startup companies I know of, with small teams
but established revenues :)

I agree it's largely too steep for startups though.

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strooltz
We use dropobox pretty much as a "file server" at the office and my biggest
issue has always been the lack of ability to assign permissions/roles. i'm
glad they incorporated this much needed feature but at that price point there
is a 0% chance we'll be upgrading. The attraction of dropbox, at least for
myself and other small business/startups, seems to be the low cost of entry
for

1) reliable and relatively secure backups

2) access over multiple computers, networks, devices

3) versioning

i only wish they had remembered the "low cost" part when adding the new
functionality because at that price point it's better for me to just set up X
number of s3 buckets and assign users/roles to each bucket and let them mount
the drive via transmit 4 or sign up for jungledisk. yes, not as eloquent but
it'll work for our needs.

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telemachos
The idea sounds great, but I really think that they need a few more pricing
points/models. As an example, I work at a school. It would be great to be able
to use this for students and teachers, but my use case is _far_ more than five
users but far _less_ than 350GB of storage needed. Some flexibility in the
plans would be great.

~~~
ja2ke
Since you work in education, would you be more likely to be able to call them
up and work out a custom license than a business would? I don't really know
how that works, but when I was in school it seemed like tech focused educators
and other district staff were able to pull off crazy deals and licensing
situations at least with some companies.

~~~
teach
Probably, but our district tech support staff is way too understaffed: just
downloading and installing Python 2.6 (which I use to teach parts of the
class) takes a couple of months lead-time. Even single-user Dropbox isn't
supported on campus; I can only run it because the installer will work
(somewhat) without admin privileges.

~~~
ja2ke
Ah, bummer. I guess the last time I was paying attention to this stuff, I was
a student, and it was at a time when there were an increasing number of
computers in schools, but no one beyond computer lab admins and tech savvy
teachers to tend for them. Didn't stop to think that it was surely fully
institutionalized at this point. Duh!

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aristidb
One question that I don't find the answer to:

Is it possible to link a computer to both a personal and a team account?

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jeffiel
Needs to have more admin permissions, like seeing all the shares, restricting
sharing outside of the team, enforcing deletion of shares when people are
booted, etc. It's a good start though to replacing the old file share box.

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urza
Well I am staying with Wuala.. Just as easy for teams to collaborate as with
the new dropbox team feature. In fact it is easy to be part of multiple teams
or groups, have your private space and public sharings, no space limits (if
you share space), better security.. I think Wuala deserves much more love. (I
am not affiliated with Wuala in any way, I am just a happy user wandering why
such a great product is not more popular)

<http://www.wuala.com/en/learn/features>

~~~
supercilious
IMHO, the reason Wuala is not popular (certainly the reason I dropped it), is:
\- Its bloated and slow Java swing client app. \- It's buggy as hell, using
the dokan integration MD5s of uploaded files do not match often. Using the
java client directly works OK, but it doesn't exactly inspire confidence. \-
Really poor integration with the OS (it wanted to install a kernel mode driver
to create a filesystem mapping.) \- The inability due to its cryptree
encryption protocols to do any kind of delta-upload. \- It had a bizarre
notion of permissions, for example, there is no way to hide from the public
which groups one is in. \- No android client \- Poor website, impossible to
use on a mobile web-browser

Much prefer the alternatives, like Dropbox, SugarSync mostly these days. Wuala
seems like it is ideal for uploading backups and other rarely changing files,
and combined with the ability to get 100GB free (almost) storage this is what
I think it should be used for. Certainly nothing involving rapid change or
collaboration.

EDIT: Bullet point formatting syntax?

~~~
Hermel
Wuala dev here. I just wanted to let you know that we have fixed some of the
issues you have mentioned. We'll switch to CBFS as file system driver shortly
(that's the same driver SugerSync is using AFAIK). However, this is still a
kernel driver. Unfortunately, Windows provides no other way to mount a custom
file system. DropBox just syncs an existing folder, but that does not scale to
large amounts of data. For example, if you have 100 GB of data online, you
cannot sync it to your notebook with a 60GB disk. On the other hand, the
dropbox approach is simpler. Delta-uploads (achieved with block-level-
deduplication) are planned for spring. You can also disable seeing the public
groups in the options now. Also, the UI (which is SWT and not Swing btw) got
more light-weight and simpler with the August update. We are not as fast with
many things as we'd like to be, but there certainly is progress.

~~~
supercilious
Thats great to hear, I'll try it out again when I get home.

Any word on an Android app or at least an API for third party developers to
make one? One of the best things about Dropbox is the API.

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whereareyou
Aaaaaaaaaaand this is the best news I have heard all week. We have eight 100GB
accounts at my company. Shared quotas and central admin are what we have been
dreaming about. I started using Dropbox in its beta, and it is beautiful to
watch this baby grow up.

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Imagenuity
A lot of businesses can replace their file server(s) with this setup. No
backup worries. Can get to it from anywhere. Files are automatically sync'd.
The local server is archaic. Server in the cloud!

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arethuza
"No backup worries"

If I used this for critical data I would still have a local backup _and_ at
least one completely separate online backup.

[Edit: No criticism of Dropbox implied - it's a great service]

~~~
eli
Well, you should probably be backing up your whole drive anyway. Even if you
managed to put _all_ your data in Dropbox (unlikely), nobody wants the pain of
having to reinstall the OS and all their apps.

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thibaut_barrere
I wouldn't be surprised to see this becoming their main income at some point
(time will tell). Well done!

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jason_slack
I had a simple e-mail exchange with a DropBox Sales person about Team a few
days ago where I told them I was interested because I need more than 100gb of
space, but $795 was huge.

They never got back to me......

~~~
Huppie
Can you elaborate a bit? Are you looking for something a bit more 'in
between', like a 200GB package? (Price per GB hasn't changed much from the
100GB package to the 350GB package, so I guess that ain't the problem.)

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jkahn
Great and a much needed product... But isn't it a bit of an expensive entry
point compared to the alternatives? Check out the current prices of box.net
and sugar sync.

~~~
Huppie
Just wondering, did you miss the 'per year' part?

Box.net is in the same price range. It's a little bit cheaper if you're using
more than the 350GB dropbox offer, but under 500GB, with four users or less.
Extra users cost $180,- per year, compared to $125,- at dropbox.

I hadn't heard of sugarsync and just had a look, they offer a lot less storage
(100GB for 3 users), and pricing for extra storage is a whopping $300,- per
100GB per year (contrast that to the dropbox offer of only $125,- per 100GB
per year). Extra users are cheaper though, only $100,-.

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kineticac
It's hard to see this work for smaller startups. Dropbox has always been for
smaller consumers, at least the free version. Dropbox for Teams seems like a
good step for bigger companies that share a lot of large files. Internet
startups probably can just upgrade their individual plans and manage their
files wisely.

I'd like a small team version, that would be pretty sweet. 50GB would suffice.

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roel_v
This is awesome. I couldn't find any info on how locking would work though -
Word's temporary files that it uses to detect simultaneous opened filed aren't
sync'ed to Dropbox (for good reason). Anyone any idea how this works?

~~~
rlpb
I don't believe there is any locking at all. This the the USP of my startup -
file synchronisation with locking fixed, so there are never any
synchronisation conflicts.

There is a catch though, which is that for high availability and locking
functionality all nodes must be always-on (from the CAP theorem) - not that
great for laptops.

I am working on something to fix this too, though.

~~~
roel_v
Sounds good, be sure to post here when you release :)

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esun
Jungledisk workgroup is a smaller package, but for a lot less money. Also,
storage fees are per gb, which is nice. We use it for our 4 person team and
pay about $20 a month. Same encryption and shared storage features.

~~~
mikedanko
Yeah, I'm completely lost at Dropbox's new price point when compared to Jungle
Disk, which is just as, if not more flexible than Dropbox. Jungle Disk is a
lot more user friendly than you're letting on to, I've used it both personally
and in the workgroup edition.

5 users over the course of the year on Jungle Disk: $240 320Gb of storage on
Jungledisk for a year: $576. Total

I'm tempted to say these are non-competing products since you can just mount
the cloud disk with Jungle Disk, but you need to sync with Dropbox, but you
can do the same with Jungle Disk.

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jfb
Hmmm. That's almost a low enough price for me to take it, even as I don't need
the enterprise features. I _do_ need the extra space, however.

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pclark
I know tons of companies that'd pay this much just for the versioning of local
files. (non developers)

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Mistone
more appropriate name would be: "Drop Box for Big Companies, or Drop Box
Enterprise edition."

I was really excited until I hit the pricing page. Should so a small biz
edition at $25-$50 per month for 3-4 people.

~~~
Huppie
Can you explain? Did you miss the 'per year' part?

You're saying $50,- per month for 3-4 people is 'small business' and $65,- per
month for 5 people is 'enterprise'? That doesn't make any sense to me.

~~~
Mistone
While the ending annual cost may come out the same, its harder for most
business to pay that in one shot instead of month to month with no contract.
So that's the main difference.

Also $50 was my higher end suggestion, big difference between $25-$30 and $65.

