Dropbox for Business

https://www.dropbox.com/business/

by charlieirish • 13 years ago

67 58 13 years ago

lpolovets• 13 years ago

One of the features is "All the space you need. Start with 1,000 GB and get more space as your team grows. If you run out, tell us and we'll increase it for free."

I wonder if that means one could sign up for 5 accounts and pay $75/month for unlimited space for personal use. (You could just use one account and never sync the other four.)

roel_v3• 13 years ago

Yes, this works. You don't even need to sign up for 5 accounts - just get one business one and never add any additional users to it.

Paul12345534• 13 years ago

Or use Crashplan for $5 a month (paying yearly) and store a TB anyways ;)

driverdan• 13 years ago

CrashPlan is a backup / archiving app. Its use case is very different than Dropbox.

BrentOzar• 13 years ago

Not sure why this is news - they've had this for months. I signed up for the business plan the instant it was available several months ago.

roel_v3• 13 years ago

It's about the new features, which make quite a difference (being able to use both business and personal from one account).

neals• 13 years ago

I guess it is inevtiable for Dropbox to keep offering 5Gb for free accounts for much longer. (Are they even doing that?)

Spiritus• 13 years ago

Free accounts are 2GB, however you can do a couple of tasks to get more.

mateuszf2• 13 years ago

With few tricks I went to 18GB.

geuis2• 13 years ago

Well, this would have been great to have before making me convert my personal account, i.e. with my non-work email address, to an account managed by my employer.

sgrytoyr• 13 years ago

My entire office is in the same boat, so I tried to figure out whether it’ll be possible to convert back to a personal account before being re-added to a business account (of the new kind), but I couldn’t find anything.

Do you know for a fact that this won’t be possible?

roel_v3• 13 years ago

It's possible with intervention from Dropbox staff. When I first set up the business version, I didn't quite understand what was going to happen (and it is all very non-intuitive, I found) and long story short I basically lost my personal account. I freaked out but support restored it and I used another email address for my business account. Then I used dropbox portable to juggle two dropboxes on one machine, but that was a pain in the ass, so I just used some computers for personal and others for business.

jasonlotito2• 13 years ago

Why would you do this, though? It's your personal account. When I had to connect to a business account, I set up a second account.

geuis2• 13 years ago

The problem is that we all use Dropbox to share files around the office. So if someone is at home, they still need access, and you can only be signed in with one account at a time. The other benefit is that we get a HUGE amount of storage under a business account.

All in all, the whole process needs some revision on their part.

ayanb• 13 years ago

Couple of reasons why this might be news.

1. Under /features check out the 'Certification and Compliance section'.

> Dropbox's storage is SSAE16/SOC1, SOC2, ISAE 3402 and ISO 27001 certified on Amazon S3 and may provide data mirroring across other secure data centers

SSAE16/SOC1 compliances were not present in the earlier versions and this is a decent step forward for adoption of dropbox in larg(ish) IT departments. This will imply "firewalls are in place at all externally facing access points".

2. From a usability point of view, the promise of a seamless way to integrate both your personal and work accounts from the same device.

3. "Seamlessly upgrade existing Dropbox accounts to Dropbox for Business and transfer files to a co-worker when someone leaves", although this is in Beta currently, this reduces a lot of headache for IT departments during employee exits.

Seems like most of the other features remain the same, though.

zwily• 13 years ago

I suspect they're just piggy-backing on Amazon's certifications. Notice how they say "Dropbox storage", not the entire service.

skue• 13 years ago

2. From a usability point of view, the promise of a seamless way to integrate both your personal and work accounts from the same device. [emphasis mine]

It wasn't clear from the announcement that Dropbox for Business will support multiple work accounts on the same device. The marketing content appeared to be written to appeal for enterprise IT managers, who obviously wouldn't be worried about this.

For IT-managed devices that's fine, but there sure are a lot of people nowadays with side businesses or who consult with multiple organizations that all want to share files. And currently it's easier to use Box (or Google Docs) than sharing folders via Dropbox and worrying about busting each sharee's Personal storage quotas.[1]

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/help/59/en

nvk• 13 years ago

Until they implement client side encryption I cannot use this service. Forget about NSA, what about rogue admins, or just plain bugs.

Dropbox = Your-Unencrypted-Files-Here.com

Spooky232• 13 years ago

Client side encryption defeats the purpose of most of the value-add features of Dropbox.

I'd actually argue that it would make the service more dangerous, as once you decrypt a file outside of the context of your desktop, the Dropbox service has the key. How do you share a file on the web or via mobile client with low friction without rendering that client-side encryption useless? (A: You don't.)

IMO, if you have data security needs that necessitate client-side encryption, and you use a public service to store that information, you need to give up whiz-bang features or reduce your security requirement.

Spooky232• 13 years ago

From a compliance standpoint, these are pretty meaningless. Sounds like Dropbox marketing isn't taking security and compliance very seriously.

Actually, it really bothers me that Dropbox touts these things as compliance factors (vs. features of the underlying storage system). Dropbox is the user-facing service, not Amazon S3.

If I put a bunch of money in some super-duper safe, chain it to a flatbed truck, and then leave the truck unlocked with the engine running, the safe doesn't make that money secure.

Khaine• 13 years ago

You can't make any assumption based on SSAE16/SOC1 compliance, without looking at the statement of applicable controls.

You can take more comfort from the ISO 27001 compliance

fosap• 13 years ago

Host your valuable business secrets with easy NSA access.

axx• 13 years ago

Same here, since the Snowden revelations we have absolutely no interest in storing ANYTHING in the US.

Dropbox is a great Tool, no question, but if you're a company (outside of the US) you should think about what you store where.

I'm fine with Dropbox, but there's my Boss, you know.

sleepyhead• 13 years ago

A good alternative outside the US is http://www.jottacloud.com/. Servers in Norway.

jonknee• 13 years ago

It shouldn't matter where you're hosting, if you want privacy it needs to be encrypted by you. The NSA can still get its hands on data outside of the US, but regardless of where something is stored you can lock it up fairly easily.

acjohnson55• 13 years ago

You could always use Boxcryptor (https://www.boxcryptor.com/)

davidu2• 13 years ago

It's easier for them to access when it's stored outside of the United States... you get that, right?

There are laws in the US that they attempt to abide by that make this more difficult domestically, but not as difficult on foreign soil.

adolph• 13 years ago

Laws without a publicly reviewable adversarial judicial process are kinda like backups without verification, right? Its probably better than nothing, but you don't know the difference until something goes wrong.

buro92• 13 years ago

The only reason we still use Dropbox rather than Box is that Dropbox is ubiquitous.

For us this means one thing: There is a well-supported and maintained Linux client that just works.

I've no doubt we'll be giving Dropbox for Business a try, but it's pretty much because of the ubiquity rather than anything else.

nader• 13 years ago

we tried box and dropbox and went with dropbox as it supports LAN-Sync (tremendously helpful when you are shoving around Photoshop files) which box didn't at the time and the Linux client.

buro92• 13 years ago

On the same topic, we thought about btsync as well. But ubiquity won out, there's a lot of convenience in being in a meeting and being able to check your phone and pulling up the latest copy of a document.

tensor• 13 years ago

In addition to these, the inability of box to handle mac bundle type files was a show stopper.

theseanstewart• 13 years ago

I just installed Box to take advantage of the free 50gb. The one critical thing I think Box is missing over Dropbox is being able to take advantage of sym links. Until then, Box is a boy among men.

aragot• 13 years ago

Maybe I'm missing some information, but how can that not be sponsored by the NSA? Will foreign companies still trust such a service? It's still excellent service, though, but I'm wondering how it will become a good deal for clients.

scotthtaylor• 13 years ago

Why is this at the top of HN?

coldtea• 13 years ago

Because people voted for it, use the service, and are interested in discussing it. You can see the discussion this brought forward in this very page.

Now, why was your comment even made again?

hammock• 13 years ago

Dropbox is a ycombinator-funded company

jakemcgraw• 13 years ago

Anyone else having their office ISP connection totally destroyed by 100+ Dropbox clients attempting Monday morning sync? We have a balanced, 300Mbs connection for about 160 users, and our network becomes unreliable during 5 minute bursts throughout the day.

bhouston• 13 years ago

I thought Dropbox implemented some type of local lan sync?

bg0• 13 years ago

Google Drive is cheaper, and you can collaborate way easier than dropbox unfortunately. I love dropbox but I can't see myself switching if Google is offering the same thing for a better price.

capkutay• 13 years ago

It'd be great if you could have dropbox for business but be able to deploy it and maintain it on your own servers.

Dropbox for Business

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