Dropbox for Windows 8

Modern technology enables a team to operate in different locations across your company and the world. If you’re a software developer, there’s no reason why you couldn’t pick the best programmers based in Germany, document writers from the UK, while your graphic artists could be based in the US.

The problem is bringing these people together. You need a system where your team or teams can share files and information, make sure that no-one overwrites someone else’s work and keep a collection of previously updated files, so you can quickly reverse back to a previous revision, if necessary. Doing this on your web site requires you have the relevant versioning technology and that it will work across various operating systems. A versioning tool that works fine on Windows may not be suitable for Mac OS X.

Dropbox is an online sharing tool that enables you to select the files you want to share and synchronise with other users, then simply upload them to the remote site. That bit is done automatically, so you don’t need to worry about having to upload the files manually. You can share folders and collaborate with other users on the files within these folders. Versioning will stop work being overwritten.

You can use Dropbox on a personal level, too. If you own a desktop computer at home, use another at work and a laptop when you’re away from the office, simply use Dropbox to synchronise your important files across each machine. You can also access your Dropbox files from the web, if you need access from a temporary host PC.

It’s not quite as effective as, say, SugarSync, which will attempt to synchronise documents from your Windows ‘My Documents’ folder to the relevant Documents folder on your Mac and vice-versa.

Dropbox will limit you to 2GB of free online storage (and you can purchase more, if required) and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.