A couple of offices at different ends of the country. 10 staff split across the offices. Standard mix of admin / finance / business documents – nothing too sensitive or controversial.

Low volume – probable <10 gb needs to be available

I’m thinking about a corporate drop box account with the versioning options.

Google apps is another option – owt else should be jumping out at me?

google apps is best when your people are using google for all of their productivity needs. i.e. using google docs arather than microsoft, using google calendar and google mail. Then it is orsum.

If you want something mapped into a more traditional and, dare I say it, obsolete working environment ( :p ) then dropbox would probably be a better solution. There are probably similar products out there but dropbox has the markket penetration for a reason. And other corporate drop box users can be shared with securely too.

How secure does it need to be?

If there’s no customer data etc, then dropbox wins hands down: reliable/simple/easy.

There are quite a few options about that do this sort of thing and they all vary in price from a simple dropbox to a full blown amazon cloud solution.

Personally I think dropbox is excellent and for the cost of the corporate stuff is well worth it. Just remember it doesn’t stop you needing to do backups and if your broadband lines go down people won’t see updated files until they’re re-synced when the broadband is up.

Google apps very good for collaborative editing of documents as well.

Just remember it doesn’t stop you needing to do backups

While that’s true, the Packrat feature on dropbox is awesome!
You can pull back old versions of files going back a looooong way.

Cheers guys
The google environment does look good, but I’m not sure I could wean them off MS Project and PowerPoint 🙄

File access rights (varying with one group) is likely to be an issue and having the data stored in the US may also be problematic. Anyone used filecamp.com?

I would suggest google apps – it has the benefit that it also works brilliantly with android devices and, I believe, iOS (better than dropbox which would have been my suggestion otherwise) using Quickoffice and GoogleDrive apps. That means that you can access your documents (and edit them) from your phone, tablet, PC, etc. Anywhere basically.

The quickoffice version of powerpoint works well BTW – there’s nothing to stop you creating files in powerpoint though and even editing them online and displaying them on any other device.

MS project I haven’t tried though. I expect there’s a viewer though.

Don’t forget Office365 as well. I know that the MS environment isn’t so popular but it works well where you are mainly using MS docs as you get proper version control seeing who did what to your docs. You also get Office WebApps which means that you can actually edit your word/excel/pp docs online albeit in a more limited way than normal.

Dropbox works extremely nicely where you have poor internet connections and several people in one office as it syncs firstly between local machines and then out to the internet.

If you have to use IE9 then it’s worth noting that Google are pulling support for apps and gmail. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/07/google_kills_ie9/

We use Dropbox at work. Very handy for sharing large amounts of data with customers. You can set up shared folders with different permissions so different groups can see each folder.

Only missing feature is making stuff read only, as if someone moves something out of a shared folder, they delete it on everyone’s machine (although you can get it back by from the change archive).

Office 365 and SkyDrive Pro 2013 here for us. It works very well.

Box looks better for company stuff than dropbox.

and having setup office 365 for business here I can’t suggest it to anyone, that may be as they have outsourced the payment/access to the local equivalent of BT here

And for fun you can also put a synology NAS in each office and install bittorrent sync on both (dead easy to do) to keep them both in sync. A bit more pricey initially but less stuff to install on each machine

We’ve banned Dropbox globally, past security breaches + not wanting to host certain info in the US meant it was a no go. If the documents aren’t commercially sensitive then it’s probably as good/mature an option as you’ll find (recently had a flyer for copy.com to at a conference which looks pretty good but not used it). If the information in the documents is covered under the DPA then you might want to get further advice (legal) on it as just shoving it into Dropbox might not count as taking the necessary means to protect the information.

Yep – that’s a real problem. If someone is using a laptop and dropbox then all of the docs are on the laptop (same with a lot of the solutions). If the laptop gets lost then all of the docs are available to whoever finds it unless you stored the dropbox in an encrypted folder.

The synology NAS system above gets by that problem unless you want to go down the encrypted folder route.

If you’ve got sensitive information like that, I’d suggest that you should have your laptop hard drives encrypted as a minimum…

box.com (not to be confused with dropbox.com) is decent, and capable of holding confidential data (assuming your passwords are strong enough).

There are encryption plugins for Dropbox…

Thanks again folks. Plenty more stuff to look at there.