FAMILY TECH: File storage sites on the Web allow groups to work together easily

All over the area, important work is being done by teams. Each individual works at their own location, usually at hours of their choosing. The work is critical and with rigid deadlines. Authority levels and responsibility boundaries are muddled at best. And the teams work for free, from home, for their kids.

The work is not a new intelligence analysis of the Middle East, or the design of a new warship; although those are important tasks too being done near here. It is tasks like planning Day Camp for Scouts or getting the new season of Little League ready to go. Tasks emotionally driven more than anything we do on the job.

Those planning warships have the support of multi-million dollar IT infrastructures and complex software for sharing files, with training for users and a help desk to call.

The planners of the local Girl Scout cookie campaign don’t have that kind of support.

I coordinate the audio-visual team for our church. Besides the fun of getting to play with electronic toys on Sundays, there is the week long effort of creating the slides used for announcements and one each for the two services.

The team consists of two ministers, the church secretary, two different musical directions and members of their respective choirs with me keeping track of it all.

And the deadline couldn’t be more rigid. Church starts promptly at 9:30 and 11 a.m. every single Sunday.

You can have a schedule overrun for an aircraft carrier, but not church. And no multi-billion dollar budget here. Try zero.

We’re tried various workflows. At first it was everyone sending me their inputs and then I created the slides. I’d e-mail the completed files out for review.

The problem came when someone made changes and sent them back to me. Sometimes, changes would get made by more than one person, and they would each sit on their changes until near the end of the week, and then send them to me. I had to consolidate the various versions.

Eventually the announcement slides became too large a file for some people’s e-mail programs to handle.

We decided each musical director should do their own slides, and I’d add standard slides we use each week.

This is where Dropbox.com comes in handy. Dropbox is one of many file storage sites on the Web.

The nice thing about Dropbox is it installs an application on your PC, Mac or Linux box. When you create a file on your PC and save it to your Dropbox folder, the application automatically sends it to the Web site. If you have another PC linked to the same account, the file then moves to that PC as well.

A small team can create a folder and share it with each other. We have one folder for the church files.

Whenever anyone changes one of the PowerPoint slide files, the file is updated on everyone’s computer. You can also see a history of who has changed a file, and when they did it.
And keeping with our zero budget, Dropbox is free if you do not need more than two gigabytes of space.

Everyone edits the files when they want. When they open the file, they are making changes to the most recent version. The free account also keeps every version going back 30 days. If someone truly messes up a file, we can go back to a previous version.

There is always the possibility someone else will open the file and make changes to it while someone else has it open. Business file collaboration systems guard against that with check in/check out capabilities Dropbox lacks. However, if that does happen, Dropbox saves each file separately alerting the team leader that there are two versions that need to be manually rectified. That has happened only once in several months of the church using Dropbox.

Dropbox is useful for your own work as well. After our minister started using Dropbox for the weekly slides, he found it useful to have access to the same files when he was at home, or at the Church.
A teacher I know travels from school to school can access her Dropbox from computers at each school.

We have a family Dropbox folder we all share. And each Dropbox account has a public folder too. I can e-mail out links to files to anyone.

Dropbox isn’t the only system like this, but seems to be the most popular. SugarSync and Drop.io offer similar services. Check their Web sites for specifics to see what is best for you. Besides the free space they offer, each also lets you buy additional space.

Links for items mentioned in this column can be found at: http://bit.ly/FamilyTech Mark’s blog is at http://markstout.blogspot.com and his email address is markstout@gmail.com.