In theory, collaboration seems simple enough – you just need to be open to ideas and solve problems as a team. Unfortunately, small complications can make collaborating far more cumbersome than you’d think.
That’s why we’ve built features to help you avoid collaboration obstacles and get back to working together.
Here are four ways Dropbox can help.
1. Your team keeps running out of space
It’s been a productive month: your team just cranked out five launch videos, each translated in a dozen different languages.
Unfortunately, all those shared videos now sit in a bloated team folder, causing several employees to run out of local storage space. It’s the sort of problem that starts as a minor nuisance and only gets worse over time.
Instead of having your employees micro-manage their hard drive space, Dropbox can do it for them. The Dropbox desktop app allows your team to access files from their desktop without taking up all the space on their hard drive.
By storing files and folders as online-only, content is now stored in the cloud. Files will continue to appear on the desktop, and team members can access them any time they have an internet connection. Let your team jump straight to sharing their work, rather than worrying how to make room for it.
2. Team conversations are scattered
You sent out details for your ad campaign, and two days later, a dozen co-workers have responded with feedback. Unfortunately, the comments are scattered across three emails, two meetings, a whiteboard and a text message. Next time, you can send your campaign plans with Paper. Paper keeps the conversation in one place, regardless of when and how your colleagues respond. Your collaborators can comment on text, photos or videos; see each other’s feedback; and contribute their own ideas in a doc tracking real-time changes.
You and your teammates can easily make and embed a screen recording so that everyone can clearly communicate their message.
As the doc owner, you can loop in new reviewers, control who has access and decide what level of feedback you want, whether comments only or in-doc editing. It’s a shared workspace that keeps everyone engaged and informed.
3. Tracking down collaborators takes too much time
You’re ready for feedback, but it’s been over a week, and half your teammates haven’t said anything. Did they forget about you? Did they miss your message?
Dropbox Business teams can now keep track of collaborators with viewer info – a live-updating look at who’s opened a file and when they last viewed it. You can see who a file’s been shared with, and check who’s viewing now. Need to give someone a nudge? You can see who hasn’t viewed the file yet, and follow up with the right co-workers, all without interrupting the group at large.
Dropbox Business teams can try an early-access version of viewer info today.
4. You can’t control who sees your work
Sometimes you want private feedback from just one or two people. But the last time you sent an early design mock-up over email, your colleague wound up forwarding it to the whole marketing team, prompting an hour of distracting debate.
With Dropbox, you can share a file securely with just a few close colleagues. Dropbox will require your collaborators to sign in first, so only the people you trust can access the file. Once your design is truly ready for primetime, you can create a shared link. Anyone can view files sent with a shared link, even if they don’t have a Dropbox account.
You can learn more about Dropbox sharing options in the Help Centre.
When people spend less time worrying about how they collaborate, they spend more time actually working together. And when you can remove the collaboration snags, you’re much more likely to love the way you work.
