Skip to main content

Collaboration with Dropbox

In an earlier post, I talked about how Dropbox ( all Dropbox posts here) had all but eliminated USB drives from our home.

That is only one of the huge benefits of Dropbox. I've been using it to collaborate with a few people.

I coordinate the Audio-Visual team at our church. We need three sets of slides each week, one each for the two services and a set of Announcement slides. The musical directors create the slides with the song lyrics, the church secretary does the announcement slides and the minister decides the Order of Service. I'll go in and add non-musical slides to the service slides (title, scripture lesson, offertory music etc.).

At first, this was a bear of an effort as everyone tried to email slides around. For a while, we tried the Documentation collaboration software OpenDocMan setup on my website, but that was over-engineered for our needs with document security and permission levels. It was hard for casual users to remember all the settings they needed to make to make slides visible to the rest of the team.

With Dropbox, I have created a folder called "This Week's Slides" in the church's Dropbox account. I then invited myself, and all the others to that shared folder.

Now, on my PC (and each of theirs) there is a folder in My Dropbox the current slides reside in. If I need to make changes, I open the file from there, make the changes and save them. A revision list lets me see who has made changes and when.






If necessary, we can roll back to a previous version.

There is no file check in/check out ability so the possibility exists that two people could have a file open and be making changes to it at the same time. The first one who saves it is fine, but the second persons changes are saved to a conflicted file I would then (as coordinator) have to reconcile the changes. It hasn't happened yet--our group is too small and we do not make a lot of changes to our files. For that reason, Dropbox is perfect for us. It may not work as well for larger groups with my dynamic files.

Even if you don't have a group of people collaborating, sharing folders has other uses.

My wife and the two young scholars in the house each have Dropbox accounts. I have a folder I share with each of them. It makes it easy to share files. Also, we have two printers in the house, a black and white only laser everyone is connected to, and a color printer. The color printer does not hold as much blank paper, so to be sure printing is done right, anyone needing a color printout saves the file as a PDF to my shared folder with them. Then I print it locally keeping an eye on the printer.

Dropbox is one of my five most useful tools. If you haven't try it out.

Shameless plea: I get can get a small bump in my free 2 gig of storage space by referring users. If you want to try Dropbox, could you sign-up using this link? Thanks!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Notes Folder : My new note taking system

I'm in the process of moving to a new way to keep my notes. It would be best to make a separate post on my long time notetaking app, Evernote, and how it now disappoints me.  Bottom line, I no longer trust the company behind Evernote since it was acquired. My first inclination was to finally look at alternatives. like Notion, Joplin, Obsidian, etc. of I was not enamored with any of them, so I gritted my teeth and stayed with Evernote. TThe situation made me think about how I use Evernote. To keep up additional posts on this topic, search on the tag Notes Folder Updates : January 24, 2024 and in updates noted here. Most of the things I store are quick notes, lists, online receipts for online bills, that sort of thing.  Kind of an online file cabinet if you will. If I were a doctoral student though I could see storing PDFs of papers and research materials.  If were working on a large project, then plans, communications etc. would all be there. Back when I began using Evernote way b
Post a Comment
Read more

Recording your own notes with Google Voice

Note :   April 2016:  Frankly I don't know if this works anymore.  It is 7 years old. I stopped using this when Google Now became useful on my phone, and I could dictate reminders using it. I found a way a while ago to use Google Voice to record a personal note, transcribe it, and email it to me. A recent Lifehacker post "Five Things We'd Like to See in Google Voice" lists that need as their #5 request, so I realized what I'd figured out is not common knowledge. In GV's Contacts, create a Group "Special Transcription" To avoid listening to my standard voice mail when I call, I recorded a short voice mail greeting for this group simply saying "Record note now" I added a contact with my own cell phone number as the only number, and made it the sole member of this group. In GV's phone settings, I edited the settings for my cell phone. In the section "Direct access to voicemail when calling your Google number from th
62 comments
Read more

Ten Years of Evernote

This blog post was set to publish exactly as the day begins on Tuesday, July 31, 2018. That is ten years to the day after my first Evernote  post. With my second note, I was already getting down to business; recording the agreement I'd come to on the phone on a minor business matter. My affection for Evernote has not dimmed since that day ten years ago. Since then, I've accumulated about 7.8 new notes a day. Ironically, I have needed to pull up only a few notes a year. Yet, when I need them, I need them badly and am glad to have Evernote all over again. My philosophy of what to capture is simple : If you encounter something you might remotely want to see again, it goes into Evernote. from a blog post June 1, 2015 I've written here about Evernote than any other topic.  Even wrote a now horribly out-of-date book. Don't get me wrong. If something better comes along that imports my Evernote notes well, I can be enticed to move.  But in t
Post a Comment
Read more