Back to the basics – How to share files online

This is another post in our “Back to the basics” series. Those amongst us who are tech geeks tend to fall in the trap of subconsciously assuming that others are as comfortable with cloud technology as we are. However, studies like the one from Spiceworks which found that upto 50% of SMBs still don’t use cloud services, bring you back to reality.

So you have a file, and want to share it online with someone in another city. Here are your options:

Send it as an email attachment: OK, you knew this already. The easiest way is to simply mail the file across as an attachment. But, this method doesn’t work well with big files since you have to sit around all day for it to upload, and many mail services have upper limits for attachment size. Moreover, sharing documents through mail has the disadvantage of the documents being hard to retrieve at a later date. If you want to go beyond simple sharing, but actually work together on a file, it is vastly inefficient to send the same file back and forth over and over.

Use a free file sharing service. This is indeed the era of cloud file sharing services like Dropbox and Google Drive. These are basically cloud based folders where you can upload files, and access them wherever you have access to the internet. For sharing purposes, you can provide other people access to this folder. Nowadays, these services have strong mobility capabilities, which means you can easily share files even from a mobile device or tablet.

File sharing and collaboration for business purposes. In a business situation, you need to not only share files with others, but also work together on them remotely, and make sure that access is secured. File collaboration services like HyperOffice are ideal here, as they let you create shared cloud folders and also have added collaboration features like version control, access permissions, comments and notifications.