We sometimes get cautioned by commenters on this blog to not be too hard on our competition. And, while we don’t consider Dropbox to be a competitor (quite the opposite, Dropbox is the reason we exist) we do take those comments to heart. That’s why, after seeing this announcement in TechCrunch, I wanted to congratulate Dropbox.
“Dropbox’s new strategy is to be boring on purpose. That is, its top priority is filling holes in its security and permissions systems so it can convince big companies it’s not some consumer toy. So today it announced view-only shared folders that let anyone on a rigid, hierarchical team look at Word, PowerPoint and other files, but only allow “editors” to modify the files. Dropbox needs to get the boring stuff locked down so enterprises will take it seriously.”
It’s ok to be boring, really. You created a product that has revolutionized sharing and increased productivity ten-fold. Sure you may have caused security chiefs and IT departments some sleepless nights, but hey, they can always shut you off.
Anyway, read-only sharing is a great first step to letting those IT sleep at night — read/write permissions — are incredibly useful in an Enterprise with sensitive documents.
Now, they only need to implement update, delete and re-share permission, sharing auto expiring and the file firewall to catch up with the ownCloud enterprise access permission features.
Just sayin’.
