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Security |
Disaster Recovery |
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Collaboration Tools |
Records Management |
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Document Mobility |
Compliance |
This week it is time to take a look at Dropbox, one of the more popular choices among law firms, and one that is often implemented by individual attorneys at a firm, without advice or consultation from the firm’s IT providers. They have used it at home, it works great there, so let’s set it up on my PC in the office, as well, so I can access my files while traveling or at home, as needed.
Dropbox appears to have started life as a consumer-focused photo-sharing product, but moved quickly into the commercial file sharing space, in an attempt to capture a share of this exploding market. True to its consumer roots, Dropbox still offers a “Free” plan for individual users, along with a “Pro” plan at $10 per user per month, and a “Business” plan offering 5 user subscriptions within the plan. Pricing for the “Business” plan starts at about $70 per month for 5 users. With both the Pro and Business plans, subscribers can choose the amount of data storage needed, with the plan priced accordingly.
Most firms will wind up with a Professional- or Business-level plan to obtain the functionality that most commercial enterprises will require (centralized billing and account administration, enhanced security features, activity reporting, etc.).
Dropbox offers user security at the folder level, and limited security for file links (only at the “Yes/No” level), but does not offer any individual file-level protection for documents stored on the service. Shared document links do not include an expiration date, nor any options to password protect the document link. In short, security in Dropbox is present but not terribly granular in either the Free or the Pro plans. The Business-level plan offers somewhat stronger security options.
One of Dropbox’s most popular features is its synchronization capability, allowing mobile users to “grab and go” with documents, and keep changes in synch upon return to a connected state. Unfortunately, this synchronization capability is also a key security flaw in Dropbox, in that it may open up the firm’s document repository to all kinds of malware and security breaches (per the well-documented horror stories reported in various technical publications). Dropbox employs a “Distributed” model for document collaboration (documents go out and come back in), rather than a “Centralized” model, (where documents remain stored securely on the server). The “Distributed” approach tends to be more user-friendly, but is less secure than the “centralized” model, generally speaking, since documents can leave the protected environment to go who-knows-where, and return to Dropbox via synchronization harboring “unwanted guests.”
Mobility is well-supported by Dropbox, offering a version of their app for virtually all popular mobile platforms (IOS, Android, Blackberry, etc.). The service keeps a 30-day history of all stored files, but offers no “free” disaster recovery options beyond that. Recovery services cannot be performed by the user, but requires Dropbox intervention.
Foldering is the only Records Management method Dropbox offers for organizing and classifying stored information, making search somewhat more of a challenge for large document repositories. The “Search” functionality is limited to searching only file and folder names, not document content. There is no tagging functionality offered.
Dropbox appears to be a reasonable choice for document storage If you want to share photos of your grandkids, send out the occasional fee agreement to a client, and work on your firm’s marketing materials while traveling with your laptop. In that scenario choose the Free version of Dropbox; it will give you everything you need to be mobile, along with a simple interface and rudimentary security setup. Don’t store anything sensitive or confidential there, however .The Pro version will give you tons more storage and modestly beefed up security options (two-step authentication and “mobile passcodes” for smartphones). The Business-level plan adds more industrial strength features, but in my view there are better options for the price.
Join me next week when I take a look at Box, a strong competitor to Dropbox, and one of those better options.
Jack Schaller has been active in the field of law office technology since 1989, and has worked with a variety of commercial accounting, legal billing, practice management, and document management software products during his twenty plus years in the software consulting field. During his tenure as a software consultant he has garnered many sales and service awards for his work with legal software products. Jack is a frequent presenter at legal conferences and seminars, and is a regular contributor to TechnoLawyer and other technology publications.