Exploring Dropbox!

My initial thoughts about Dropbox –

• Super easy to download and navigate

• Attractive lay out (I like the coloured pencil drawings)

• Great that its free (well... you get 2GB)!

• Will the amount of space be enough to really be worth using?

• Can this cloud storage device translate for use in the professional realm?

What I already use Dropbox for -

I have been using Dropbox since the beginning of last year primarily as a means to share music and photos with two of my friends living in Germany. It was one these friends who introduced me to Dropbox. I received an email from him to join/download the software and it was an easy process to set up and share files. Sharing folders of music and photos, however, as far as I’ve ever gone with Dropbox. I have not used it on my phone or as a means of backing up my documents and photos (music would require me to pay for the service to get more space which at the moment I can’t afford to do – but here is a link that’s offers a good, basic instruction on how to sync your iTunes library across all of your computers using Dropbox.


I am still using a USB stick to backup my data but after this exercise I'm thinking that might change!

Logging in to Dropbox with Create-Communicate-Collaborate in mind I realised that hadn’t done the below things… (nice of Dropbox to create a list for me and even nicer of them to give me some free space for ticking them all off – if you want to find how to get some extra space Dropbox lists a bunch of ways to get free space).

I got 125MB for connecting my Twitter account to Dropbox and another 125MB for following Dropbox on Twitter. And 500MB when a friend I've invited signs up. 




So my initial for this exercise was to complete all of these steps so that I had better understanding of Dropbox’s functionality and purposes (you think I could have spared the time when I first installed it to take the tour!).

Investigating Dropbox -

This is what I had still to do -

One excellent functionality that Dropbox offers is that it can be downloaded and used on a whole range of mobiles and tablets so this will appeal to almost everyone. Having a file hosting service that can work with a host of different branded devices is a good start if it is truly going to be a tool to communicate and collaborate. 

Ok so now I can access Dropbox on my android phone, on computers at RMIT and on my work computer (in case I want/need to do some school work on my lunch break).

One app I installed for my android phone to tie in with what Dropbox does is DropSpace. DropSpace automatically syncs SD card directories to Doropbox. I thought this would be a good thing to download to totally ensure that all my phone data is stored somewhere else incase I lose my phone. Here is a link that gives you a bit more info on DropSpace.

I also played around with working on a test document from home on my lap top, on the way to work on the train using my android phone and at work on my workstation computer. It does work very well - giving me the latest version to work from with all of my devices.  The thing I really like about it is that you can go to a previous version if for some reason you've deleted the document (or someone else who you've shared the document with). 



Here are all the tasks checked off. It was good to spend an hour or two getting through them. 

These two points from the tour are what Dropbox is in a nutshell -

•  that you can be anywhere and access your documents/photos/music etc from any of your computers or from your mobile phone - click here for Dropbox's summary

•  and you can share your files with other people and collaborate on shared files  - click here for Dropbox's summary 

I thought that going back to the first post where I set out my goals for this assignment would be a good way to focus my thoughts on Dropbox.

One of the goals is to - 

• gain an understanding of how theses tools can be utilized specially by the library and information agency sector

With that in mind can Dropbox be more than for just personal use and sharing folders and files  between family and friends?

I have this much space....which would be laughable for any kind of library or information agency. 

So the question is can Dropbox work for organisations and institutions?

Can Dropbox be used in a professional environment?

I work in the Document Delivery Department at Monash University. We use a ‘Post to Web’ service where postgraduates and academics are sent an email with a secure link to the scanned PDF article or chapter they've requested and they have 5 days to download the article or print it before it's wiped. 

I thought it would be interesting to see if Dropbox is used by Inter-Library Loan departments.  Turns out it is. A law librarian from California, Tom Boone, blogs about using Dropbox for library document delivery – you can read his post here.

In summary Tom writes about the need to send large PDF documents requested by his university's staff and students and that even Gmail accounts cannot handle how large these files are. So to circumvent this he uses Dropbox. He can upload the article he has got for someone into his Dropbox's public folder and then send them a unique URL and send it to the requester who can download it without even having to have an account with Dropbox!  Another great thing is that he can keep these documents in the public folder after he's sent them so that if a student or academic deleted the email or lost their PDF he can send them the URL again. 

This happens at my work all the time - people delete or never get the 'Post to Web' email (or it goes to their spam). We store documents in a 'sent floder' on one of the library's drives but not for very long because of the amount of documents that we send out. They are deleted to save on space. Perhaps if we had a cloud we would't have to do this. And we do have people phone us up asking for a resend of a document they had been sent 6 months before.

Would there be enough 'space' with Dropbox for a big company or institution?

The one important thing here is that an organisation or business would have to pay for Dropbox - something called Dropbox for Teams.  There is unlimited storage which wold be the main reason for using it and you can select the number of people in your 'Team' - so for my Document Delivery team of 8 people it would cost $1170.00 for 8 licences or  if you had 250 staff it would be $31,420.00. 
There are perhaps problems with the servers being located in the US (ownership problems due to US laws) but this post is already too large to go into it (if I've got time in a few days I might post something because it does seem like an important thing to get a grasp on).

Dropbox vs. Google Drive - 

This is where I feel Dropbox falls down. It has no similar feature for group edits to happen simultaneously. I don't think I would change from Google Drive to Dropbox if I were doing a group edit. But Dropbox will still work well if multiple people are sharing a document and the ability to go back to previous versions will allow a group to see the edit history.

Having used Google Drive (the shared document feature) for both Information Provision 1 (we created a blog and shared a Google document between our group that had our report, our blog summary and any questions we had for each other), and Information Centre Management where it was crucial. When our ICM project was almost due there were some times where all 6 people were editing the project document on Google Docs. We could see with individually coloured cursers who was doing what where. Super useful tool for collaboration.

Over all I give two thumbs up to Dropbox. Its easy to use, its free for individuals not needing much space, it appears as a folder in all my computers and it does feel safe and secure. And I do think that a library or information organisation could use it happily. I found exploring Dropbox very instructive and something that is going to help me with my University studies quite a lot. 

Ellen