Dropbox vs Skydrive Pro

Now that Office 365 comes with Microsoft’s Dropbox equivalent in the form of Skydrive Pro, a number of our clients are asking if they should ditch Dropbox and move over to Skydrive.

Als check: power bi developer

In a number of ways Dropbox and Skydrive are very similar, in the most basic format they both allow you save a document into a folder which then synchronises back to a cloud based service. Once the files and folders are hosted in the cloud then you can access these documents from almost any PC, phone or tablet from anywhere in the world. Many people think that Skydrive Pro is a new product but it’s actually just a rebrand and simplification of what used to be called SharePoint Workspace and in order to use many of the features of Skydrive you need to setup Sharepoint within Office 365. Because Skydrive is based on Sharepoint in typical Microsoft fashion a number of the easy to use features that people love with Dropbox, such as sharing files, are slightly more complex to setup. What this however means is that from a business point of view the controls that Sharepoint gives you are also available in Skydrive Pro. One of the big augments against Skydrive Pro is that it is limited to 7GB of personal data, whereas Dropbox can be a lot larger than this. However this is a where again Microsoft’s marketing department haven’t really got the correct message across. It is true that a Skydrive Pro user can only have 7GB of “Personal” data, however if they access say departmental Sharepoint sites then the files stored in this area aren’t counted against your 7Gb. So in some ways your Skydrive storage limited in only really restricted by the storage available to you in SharePoint (which is unlimited as you can keep adding to this) Dropbox is really the market leader and rightly so, its ease of use has made is extremely popular and with the Dropbox for business bring with it a central administrative control IT departments are even accepting of the once consumer oriented product. Steve Balmer once said that “Dropbox was a great little company” and when Steve Jobs was trying to purchase Dropbox for Apple he told there CEO that “Dropbox is a feature not a business” and I can see where both of these people were coming from. Dropbox was one of the first companies to offer an easy to use cloud based storage solution and as such grabbed market share. However now that you get iCloud with Apple, Gdrive with Google and Skydrive with Microsoft why would you use another solution? For any Office 365 customer, the built in business level security and features of the Skydrive Pro product make it very difficult to make a case for staying with Dropbox. As a cost comparison, a company with 10 employees would pay $1,420 dollars a year for Dropbox for Business, while an Office 365 customer could pay just $600 a year, get access to Skydrive Pro, Sharepoint, Lync and Exchange and still save $820 a year. Here at Purenetworking.net we have found that Skydrive Pro has generate more questions and interest from our customer than probably any other feature in Office365. If you need any other information on how you can setup Skydrive Pro or need help migrating from another product please let us know.