Hi, In my very first blog post I will share some of my thoughts about a program that I've experienced to be not only very effective and useful with tasks of your own, but also very valuable when working in groupwise projects. The latest I've experienced as an aid of our project of 4 people has been Dropbox. Let's discuss this amazing tool!
Those who don't know yet, Dropbox is, in a nutshell, a virtual memory stick, accessible everywhere you have a connection to internet. After registering an account and Installing dropbox on your personal computer a dropbox folder is created on your computer and to the server. In dropbox you can drag&drop stuff (copy) and files are uploaded and automatically synchronized. Same thing reversed, adding stuff to dropbox at web UI downloads them automatically to your computer's dropbox folder.In my opinion, what makes dropbox so fantastic is that it's free and the files are securely safe and accessible from anywhere. What's best , it Contains 2 GBs of free space and referrals increase your quota. If you need more space you can pay a monthly fee.
What makes it a valuable tool for a group is that you can create shared folders and give permissions to other group members to edit and view them. After sharing, people can upload various files to shared folder and new/edited files are synced to every member of group as soon as they are connected into their dropbox account. This feature is really handy specially what comes to projects where file sizes are bigger (lots of graphics) and there are lots of different file types. In The latest project at Demola we found Dropbox sharing very useful. We also Uploaded small text files to share what we had in mind and had a short discussions/briefings in an email stylish way.
Dropbox is fairly new tool for group working so I think there will be a lot of new features coming at some point. Personally what I would consider nice features would be a message wall or log message. Also when you add new files in shared folders you could share a short info or message of your own and also show the files a certain group member uploaded. These messages could be then visible to everyone when they open the project folder. Also a short realtime messaging system could be useful along with logs.
- Aleksi
Funny that you chose a topic I'm using a lot at the moment. With dropbox a couple of friends an me are sharing all our pictures of our exchange in Tampere. And it works really good.
ReplyDeleteOk, but sounds a bit like advertisement to my ear! You didn't copy the sentences from the Dropbox homepage? No offence man, but I'm not sensing any mindwork behind your evaluation...
ReplyDeleteI recently installed the application to my Vista Laptop. I hoped that I and few colleagues of mine could share some course material. We also have the need to edit same file(s) at the same time.
Altough the application does have a synchronized file system it lacks file locking for editing purposses. So precious information/work might be easilly lost. Plus I managed to achieve deadlock situation (don't ask me how) even there shouldn't be file locks.
When it comes to professional use, this is no match for Subversion or CVS systems. They don't have this kind of bugs and they have advanced systems for resolving conflicts. Tough the setup process for Subversion might require too much effort for novice users especially if they need is only for laisure or so.
Basically the only benefit that this application offers is free space and service platform and I supppose there is better/more intuitive applications to be used for!
- Trolly ;)
Haha. Was my post an evaluation of the product? No it was an introduction of tool.
ReplyDeleteAnyways,
I really had no thoughts for real professional use and wouldn't
even want to try Dropbox for a project that may need simultaneous file editing. I noticed the same problem on Google docs at some point
when we were editing the same project document btw. I've used the Subversion also in software projects and it really is a mandatory specially when you do programming.
I just shared my subjective experiences in my blogpost in our ongoing project because it fits perfectly to our group where is people that are less, lets say, computer oriented people and we don't edit files simultaneously.
Dropbox works because its really simple to use in this case, has enough space and its free.
Why my post looked like a marketing speech was that it was lacking any criticism and you clearly pointed out that right now it's definitely not an option for projects where you need simultaneous file updating
and Im with you there! I'm trying to be more objective next time :)
Also it's annoying that you don't know who is updating what, but they probably want to keep it simple. So my opinion for working in groups dropbox is the one that everybody can use and learn easily, I would recommend it if it's suitable for the project, maybe used together with Google Docs.
Btw I wouldn't install any applications to Vista other than new
operating system :)
- Aleksi
Great catches and knockbacks man! Eagerly waiting for your next post... ;)
ReplyDelete