Since every other person on here is alledgedly an IT consultant, I thought I’d ask here. I also thought I’d ask here because I don’t know what term to put into Google to solve my problem.

We use dropbox as our file system at work. It’s all accessed through Microsoft Explorer. When I finish a report it has to be reviewed – we’ve just been emailing the file as an attachment but this has meant that corrected versions have been lost and the wrong report issued.

At my old job we had a server based system – I’d click “Link” in Outlook and then put a link to the file in the system into the email. Then whoever was reviewing it was editing it in the folder it belonged in, overwriting the old version. Is there a way to do this with dropbox? Or is there another way of making sure people are editing the file in its location, not an addtional copy that’s been emailed around?

Thanks!

Answer is – probably.

I’ve not used dropbox, but both OneDrive and Box (which is different to DropBox) support collaboration on files, which is what you want. In fact, in OneDrive, if you use the in-browser editor, you can watch other people type if you edit it at the same time! They have features to lock files and prevent clashes and so on. They support versioning, so all your edits are saved with a version number.

I was right: here are some links specific to DropBox:

How to share links instead of emailing the document.
And the simultaneous editing thing , however I’d only use this if you really want to simultaneously edit as you are editing in a browser and you don’t get full word features.

Definitely avoid emailing copies around, it’s a ballache and unnecessary these days.

No idea about Dropbox – I doubt it as AFAIA it’s just [Amazon] cloud storage. Something collaborative, such as Google Docs or Office 360/OneDrive, work work better (i.e. do what you want)

molgrips – I’ve seen that you can share links to the files, but they’re just another copy. The simultaneous editing thing looks like it’ll do the job – most of the review is just adding comments. Thanks for finding that.

I’ve seen that you can share links to the files, but they’re just another copy.

They would have to download the file and re-upload it, which is as easy as dragging and dropping (similar to emailing an attachment but there’s still only one copy).

But there’s also MS Office integration, where you can open a file directly on DropBox from the Word ‘open file’ dialog. Then it’ll get saved directly back to DropBox when you save.

Clicky

Thanks for finding that.

From what I can tell DropBox is identical to Box that we use at work, so I’ve already been through all these options 🙂

There’s also the folder sync option where you have a local copy of DropBox on your hard drive and any changes in there sync to the server. More info here.

I use sharepoint at work for version control, version gets uploaded initially, then gets checked out and then checked back in with amendments and the revision number goes up by 0.1 or 1.0. My work is quite behind the times though so wouldnt be surprised if this is a decade old and no longer available…

Does really depend if you need a ISO 9001 system to control and manage documents. Seems that the OP just needs to share stuff around (not that a ‘proper’ system wouldn’t be a good idea).

If you’re all on an MS office subscription are “Sharepoint” or “Onedrive” not possible options?