7 ms·

Dropbox for Business

67 points by charlieirish 13y ago

lpolovets 13y 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_v 13y 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 13y ago
  Or use Crashplan for $5 a month (paying yearly) and store a TB anyways ;)
  - driverdan 13y ago
    CrashPlan is a backup / archiving app. Its use case is very different than Dropbox.
BrentOzar 13y 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_v 13y ago
  It's about the new features, which make quite a difference (being able to use both business and personal from one account).
neals 13y ago
I guess it is inevtiable for Dropbox to keep offering 5Gb for free accounts for much longer. (Are they even doing that?)
- Spiritus 13y ago
  Free accounts are 2GB, however you can do a couple of tasks to get more.
  - mateuszf 13y ago
    With few tricks I went to 18GB.
    - klausjensen 13y ago
      Could you elaborate?
      - mateuszf 13y ago
        https://www.dropbox.com/help/200/en https://www.dropbox.com/help/200/en
      - coolnow 13y ago
        You get space when linking your Dropbox with Twitter, and things like referring friends. If you participate in the yearly challenges, you get space for every step you complete successfully.
      - ghshephard 13y ago
        I won't speak for the parent, but, some people have been know to use Virtual Machine that pretend to be a "Friend" and take advantage of Dropbox's customer acquisition technique.
        JoshGlazebrook 13y ago
        This works. They use your MAC address of your network adapter to differentiate referrals.
geuis 13y 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 13y 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_v 13y 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.
- jasonlotito 13y 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.
  - geuis 13y 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.
    - jasonlotito 13y ago
ayanb 13y 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 13y ago
  I suspect they're just piggy-backing on Amazon's certifications. Notice how they say "Dropbox storage", not the entire service.
- skue 13y 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 https://www.dropbox.com/help/59/en
- nvk 13y 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
fosap 13y ago
Host your valuable business secrets with easy NSA access.
- axx 13y 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 13y ago
    A good alternative outside the US is http://www.jottacloud.com/ http://www.jottacloud.com/. Servers in Norway.
    - Karunamon 13y ago
      This probably puts you at even greater risk, since the intelligence folks don't even have the pretense of rule of law once you're outside the borders. That, and the Nordic countries have traditionally been very friendly to U.S. req^H^H^Hdemands for information.
      - SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
        Easier (legally) for NSA folk or other bad actors to hack yes. But when did that stop them? But if your data never crosses a US border (E.g. a Norwegian person using jottacloud), then the NSA cable taps have no effect. If your server is not in a US server farm or in a US Company, then it can't be subverted at destination the way that lavabit was going to go (and the other major companies have already gone). I'm really suspicious of this "safer in the USA" stuff right now.
        roc 13y ago
        > "if your data never crosses a US border (E.g. a Norwegian person using jottacloud), then the NSA cable taps have no effect" Perhaps, as pertains to the taps we were warned about by Mark Klein, Snowden, et al. But if you think that's the full extent of US intelligence taps, Angela Merkel's cell phone rather disagrees. (And the notion that they'd tap a half dozen foreign leaders before they tapped a trunk line or five is pretty laughable.)
buro9 13y 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 13y 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.
  - buro9 13y 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.
    - davidu 13y ago
      box lets you pull up a file on your phone... we find the versioning and collaboration features of box to be far supperior to dropbox... lan sync is nice though, I didn't actually know dropbox had that.
  - tensor 13y ago
    In addition to these, the inability of box to handle mac bundle type files was a show stopper.
- theseanstewart 13y 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.
- Filecloud 13y ago
  If you have interest to try out a self hosted alternative, you might want to check out our product Tonido FileCloud. It has the ubiquity (Windows, Mac and Linux Sync Clients) you are asking for and have better admin controls than Dropbox for Business.
aragot 13y 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 13y ago
Why is this at the top of HN?
- coldtea 13y 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 13y ago
  Dropbox is a ycombinator-funded company
jakemcgraw 13y 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 13y ago
  I thought Dropbox implemented some type of local lan sync?
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
bg0 13y 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 13y 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.

67 points by charlieirish 13y 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_v 13y 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 13y ago
Or use Crashplan for $5 a month (paying yearly) and store a TB anyways ;)
- driverdan 13y ago
  CrashPlan is a backup / archiving app. Its use case is very different than Dropbox.

BrentOzar 13y 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_v 13y ago
It's about the new features, which make quite a difference (being able to use both business and personal from one account).

neals 13y ago

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

Spiritus 13y ago
Free accounts are 2GB, however you can do a couple of tasks to get more.
- mateuszf 13y ago
  With few tricks I went to 18GB.
  - klausjensen 13y ago
    Could you elaborate?
    - mateuszf 13y ago
      https://www.dropbox.com/help/200/en https://www.dropbox.com/help/200/en
    - coolnow 13y ago
      You get space when linking your Dropbox with Twitter, and things like referring friends. If you participate in the yearly challenges, you get space for every step you complete successfully.
    - ghshephard 13y ago
      I won't speak for the parent, but, some people have been know to use Virtual Machine that pretend to be a "Friend" and take advantage of Dropbox's customer acquisition technique.
      - JoshGlazebrook 13y ago
        This works. They use your MAC address of your network adapter to differentiate referrals.

geuis 13y 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 13y 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_v 13y 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.
jasonlotito 13y 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.
- geuis 13y 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.
  - jasonlotito 13y ago

ayanb 13y 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 13y ago
I suspect they're just piggy-backing on Amazon's certifications. Notice how they say "Dropbox storage", not the entire service.
skue 13y 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 https://www.dropbox.com/help/59/en
nvk 13y 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

fosap 13y ago

Host your valuable business secrets with easy NSA access.

axx 13y 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 13y ago
  A good alternative outside the US is http://www.jottacloud.com/ http://www.jottacloud.com/. Servers in Norway.
  - Karunamon 13y ago
    This probably puts you at even greater risk, since the intelligence folks don't even have the pretense of rule of law once you're outside the borders. That, and the Nordic countries have traditionally been very friendly to U.S. req^H^H^Hdemands for information.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
      Easier (legally) for NSA folk or other bad actors to hack yes. But when did that stop them? But if your data never crosses a US border (E.g. a Norwegian person using jottacloud), then the NSA cable taps have no effect. If your server is not in a US server farm or in a US Company, then it can't be subverted at destination the way that lavabit was going to go (and the other major companies have already gone). I'm really suspicious of this "safer in the USA" stuff right now.
      - roc 13y ago
        > "if your data never crosses a US border (E.g. a Norwegian person using jottacloud), then the NSA cable taps have no effect" Perhaps, as pertains to the taps we were warned about by Mark Klein, Snowden, et al. But if you think that's the full extent of US intelligence taps, Angela Merkel's cell phone rather disagrees. (And the notion that they'd tap a half dozen foreign leaders before they tapped a trunk line or five is pretty laughable.)

buro9 13y 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 13y 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.
- buro9 13y 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.
  - davidu 13y ago
    box lets you pull up a file on your phone... we find the versioning and collaboration features of box to be far supperior to dropbox... lan sync is nice though, I didn't actually know dropbox had that.
- tensor 13y ago
  In addition to these, the inability of box to handle mac bundle type files was a show stopper.
theseanstewart 13y 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.
Filecloud 13y ago
If you have interest to try out a self hosted alternative, you might want to check out our product Tonido FileCloud. It has the ubiquity (Windows, Mac and Linux Sync Clients) you are asking for and have better admin controls than Dropbox for Business.

aragot 13y 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 13y ago

Why is this at the top of HN?

coldtea 13y 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 13y ago
Dropbox is a ycombinator-funded company

jakemcgraw 13y 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 13y ago
I thought Dropbox implemented some type of local lan sync?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

bg0 13y 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 13y 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.