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File Sharing Becomes More User Friendly with Sitedrop

By Christopher Mohr
TMCnet Contributing Writer

When Dropbox (News - Alert) was first released in 2008, it was a revolutionary breakthrough in file sharing. The time-saving benefit of automatically updating files for the team as they were modified, added or deleted was much easier than emailing the files as attachments or using version control.

But as useful as Dropbox was, it fell short in some areas. It piggybacked off of Explorer, which many non-techies find cumbersome to use. It also did not provide thumbnail previews—a major inconvenience for projects with hundreds of image files.

This led to the creation of Sitedrop, a New York-based tech startup that provides a service that integrates with Dropbox. The company has received funding from Betaworks (News - Alert), a VC firm also in New York.

After setting up Dropbox, you setup an account with Sitedrop. Presently, accounts are free and limited to five workspaces, larger accounts will likely be available in the future with a fee. You would then setup a subdomain on sitedrop.com. If your company was named Acme Widgets, the URL to your Sitedrop site would be acmewidgets.sitedrop.com. This site would contain your Dropbox files. Password protection is available for the site and user rights can be configured for each folder.

Companies can add their logo to their Sitedrop site by taking an image of their brand and saving it as “_logo.png” to the root folder.

With Sitedrop, users have a more intuitive way to use Dropbox than its default Explorer interface. Image files appear as thumbnails, making it easier to locate the right file. It integrates with Hightail, bringing embedded file sharing to a website.

Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is not to create an entirely new solution from scratch, but to enhance an existing one. Sitedrop gives teams that need to share files a great way to leverage Dropbox that is easier to use.