File-sharing applications, particularly at the enterprise level, are more popular than ever. Dropbox estimates it has 300 million users who upload a billion files a day into its cloud servers. Box, geared toward businesses, has about 34,000 paying companies on its service. Other file-sharing options are available and growing in scope and popularity, seemingly giving organizations a myriad of choices when deciding which is best for them.
Increasingly, training departments are turning to file-sharing options to distribute content to their workers. Some of these employees don’t have computers at their disposal during the workday, and instead access documents via iPad, Surface or tablet. Conventional wisdom would suggest there are plenty of solutions to adapt to this strategy, but companies are discovering that simply isn’t the case. Here are some reasons why there aren’t enough file-sharing options for tablets, along with a new option that solves this conundrum for organizations:
The Market Is Expanding, But …
Dropbox and Box dominate the market, and other file-sharing options such as Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive are entrenching themselves as well at the enterprise level. However, these platforms do not offer a focused solution that many companies—as well as departments within those companies—require to streamline and improve their processes. Take video, for example. These enormous files can be impossible to share and eat up the allotted storage of users, departments, and organizations on some platforms, and, subsequently, the solution ends up not solving the problems that enterprises were hoping they would. So yes, there are plenty of file-sharing options available, but possibly hardly any for the specific needs of your company.
No Optimization for Tablets
As already mentioned, many popular file-sharing options don’t translate well to tablets and are just … clunky. Storage can become an issue, particularly gigantic files (i.e., video) residing locally. Retrieval becomes a pain if users are forced to sift through hundreds of folders simply to find one document. Version control is always a worry, particularly with mobile employees—if multiple users are accessing the same document, you might never be sure who has the most recent, most correct copy. Without optimization to tablets, some file-sharing solutions feel like trying to place a square peg into a rectangular hole: You might make it fit, but it won’t be perfect.
Not Always Ideal for Enterprises
File-sharing options can serve departments well—in fact, many teams have adopted the non-business solutions of some platforms for their professional use. Across an entire company, however, is another matter. For starters, unless due diligence is taken to use the access control capabilities of the application, employees may be able to view or modify documents from the entire company. Furthermore, there’s the aforementioned problem of being bombarded with too many documents and not efficiently finding the precise one. And when organizations are using such solutions informally (without the blessing of IT), security becomes a major issue.
An Innovation Arrives
Fortunately, tablet-based solutions are now available that solve the problems presented by other file-sharing options. These innovative platforms can limit access and send only the appropriate files to reside locally on individual devices. End-users aren’t overwhelmed searching through multiple folders, nor can they access documents they should have no business accessing. Compression tools that shrink file sizes to a manageable level facilitate the use of video. Optimized for iPad, Surface and tablets, this new wave of solutions is anything but clunky.
What has been your experience using file-sharing options on tablets?
