Cohousing-L Mailing List: Experience with community use of Dropbox?

[Oz (oz]

I recently began using Dropbox, a tool which I've found pretty useful for
file sharing and was wondering about whether other communities have
experience with this commercial product. If you've used it IN YOUR
COMMUNITY, I'd love to hear more.

BACKSTORY

Songaia Cohousing started out trying to share files on the Windows NT
platform, but several people had a very hard time maintaining access on
different machines - and our techie folks quickly got tired trying to
support it. Then we tried SharePoint, also running on Windows NT - another
frustrating experience given the poor Macintosh support. Lately, we've been
using Google Docs - but that really seems far better suited for
collaborative editing rather than just simple file sharing.

DROPBOX

What I find most seductive about Dropbox is its very strong cross-platform
support. I can access a simple shared folder across my Desktop, Laptop,
Android Phone, and iPad. The Dropbox software looks just like a file folder
system and integrates right into your normal workflow, e.g., from any
application, you can save or open a file directly into a shared, Dropbox
folder.

You can also access your dropbox from their website, so you can get to your
files from any device capable of accessing the web, i.e., if you're
somewhere without your own computer, you can still get to your files.

Dropbox lures you into their online service by giving you 2 Gigs of storage
and making it easy for you to share files with friends/family - they have
to get an account as well. The FREE service advertises 2 Gig of storage.
They also sell larger amounts of storage, e.g., 50 Gigs costs $99 per year.

You can sign up for Dropbox by going to their website or using this link:

http://db.tt/rW49VX1k

Note: they are using a viral marketing approach, so if you use the link
above, then my free storage space increases by .5 Gig per new account (up
to a maximum of 16 Gigs). It seems to me that having a few larger Dropbox
accounts might be a nifty, low-cost way to have a bunch of free cloud
storage.

Thanks for any insights on using this tool in your community,

Oz Ragland
ozragland.com