Share Files Online — Part 1: Overview

Over the last few months I’ve answered a lot of ques­tions about online file-sharing.

“Should I upload my files to my own web­site or put them on a file-sharing service?”

“How can I make a PDF avail­able on my blog?”

“What about sites like Google Docs and Zoho?”

As with nearly any­thing, the answer depends on the question.

And as with nearly any­thing, the ques­tion is: what are you try­ing to do?

Begin with the End in Mind

First, ask your­self, “What do I want to do?”

Under­stand­ing that in some cases there’s a lot of over­lap, I divide file-sharing tools into two heaps. Pub­li­ca­tion tools let you put a file where oth­ers can get it. Col­lab­o­ra­tion tools let you coop­er­a­tively cre­ate a doc­u­ment with others.

Pub­li­ca­tion Tools

Pub­li­ca­tion tools offer many benefits.

• You get to use your own favorite pro­grams to cre­ate doc­u­ments. Love Emacs or Word­Pad? Knock your­self out.
• Gen­er­ally you can share any type of file you want to, though some sites do impose restric­tions (for exam­ple, Flickr is just for photo sharing).
• Low com­mit­ment required: in most cases your audi­ence doesn’t need to cre­ate accounts to access your files.
• The orig­i­nal doc­u­ment lives on your com­puter, and you can access it whether you’re online or not.

Cons

And of course, there are trade-offs.

• It’s awk­ward at best to cre­ate a doc­u­ment col­lab­o­ra­tively with others.
• Many sites impose a limit on the total size of your files, though in most cases they let you add space through a paid subscription.

Col­lab­o­ra­tion Tools

Pros

No ques­tion: col­lab­o­ra­tion cools are tool.

• You can cre­ate doc­u­ments with a colleague.
• Some tools (like Adobe Buzz­word) pro­vide sophis­ti­cated revi­sion track­ing and com­ment­ing: who made that change? What did the doc­u­ment look like two days ago?
• You can edit doc­u­ments almost any­where. It just takes a browser.
• All your con­trib­u­tors use the same soft­ware to cre­ate doc­u­ments. You don’t need to make every­one install the same soft­ware, and you don’t need to resolve things like iWorks-vs-MS Word incompatibilities.

Cons

But they’re not per­fect for every situation.

• Each site typ­i­cally sup­ports only cer­tain doc­u­ment types. Want to upload a PDF to YouTube? You’re out of luck.
• You have to use browser-based pro­grams to cre­ate your doc­u­ments. While these are very cool, and some­times very easy to use, they’re rarely as pow­er­ful as their desktop-based coun­ter­parts like MS Office, OpenOf­fice, and iWorks.
• There are often size lim­its unless you opt for a paid subscription.
• If your Inter­net con­nec­tion (or the site) goes down, in most cases you can’t access your documents.

What’s Next?

In the next post I’ll take a deeper look at Pub­li­ca­tion tools — spe­cific tools, how to use them, and their appro­pri­ate­ness for var­i­ous situations.

After that we’ll take a sim­i­lar look at Col­lab­o­ra­tion tools.