•  Have you ever wanted to share something with a person or people in another part of the country or another part of the world and wondered how on earth to do so?
•  Have you ever wanted to send someone a selection of photographs and your email program or theirs won’t allow it as they are too big?
•  Do you work collaboratively with a dispersed team?

If you answer yes to any of these questions then today’s blog and the following few weeks are for you!

Over the next few weeks, I will be discussing different ways of working collaboratively via the Cloud. We will be looking at Dropbox, Skydrive, Google Docs, Box, Outlook.com Google Apps and Office 365

Dropbox

The first of the cloud sharing solutions I am going to talk about is Dropbox. It is the first one that I used and still use now for some things.

So what is drop box?

Think of it like a big storage box that you can divide into different sections. It lives on a server at Dropbox headquarters and you access it via the internet.  You can “drop” your files into your very own Dropbox and only you have access to them.

Folders

Set up your Dropbox just like you set up your own computer with folders for different things. There is already a folder for sharing photos and a folder for documents.  Dropbox is installed on your computer and it mirrors the Dropbox on the web. This means that whatever you put in your Dropbox on your computer will show up in the web folder too! You can upload documents or pictures or just about any file to your online Dropbox via the up loader tool.

Synchronising

Once your Dropbox is installed on your own computer and you are singed in to the web, both stay synchronised, which means that they are always the same!!

Sharing

So what’s all this about sharing with other people? You can create a folder that you share with selected people.  Click Share and invite them by email to share your Dropbox. Now whatever files you place there will be accessible to the person you are sharing with. Even better – they can upload files to the Dropbox too for you to share.

Getting to Dropbox

You can get your files no matter where you are in the world. If you travel abroad a lot and need certain files to work on, pop them into a folder in your Dropbox and then if you are in a hotel, an internet café or your Great Aunt Jane’s living room, so long as you have a computer with an internet connection you can log in to Dropbox via the web and download the documents you want.

Storage Space

When you first install Dropbox you have 2GB of free online storage space. This is great for simple documents however once you start uploading photos and large documents, you might want more storage. You could pay for storage, on a monthly basis and have up to 500 GB of storage. Or you could invite your friends! Every time you invite a friend to Dropbox and they install it, you get 500MB extra storage free – as a thank you. You can earn up to 16GB this way!!

I hope that this blog has helped you to understand about how Dropbox works, you can try it for yourself from here  http://db.tt/kkXCkXz

Till next time