How to Share Files — Part 2: Publication Tools

In last week’s post, How to Share Files — Part 1: Overview, I drew a dis­tinc­tion between publication-based online file-sharing and collaboration-based online file-sharing.

In brief, Pub­li­ca­tion tools let you put a file where oth­ers can get it. Col­lab­o­ra­tion tools let you coop­er­a­tively cre­ate a doc­u­ment with oth­ers. There’s a lot of over­lap between these cat­e­gories, but I’d argue that most tools are more like one or the other in spirit.

This post will dis­cuss Pub­li­ca­tion tools in more detail. These are tools that assume you’ve cre­ated your doc­u­ment already (for exam­ple in Microsoft Word, Adobe Acro­bat, or Apple iWorks) and want to let other peo­ple down­load the doc­u­ment. This approach assumes peo­ple have what­ever pro­gram they need to open your doc­u­ments (for exam­ple Word, Adobe Reader, iWorks, or Open Office).

Pub­li­ca­tion Refresher

Option 1: Old School

Ok, I sup­pose real old school is email. But here I mean sim­ply upload­ing files to your web host so peo­ple can down­load them.

Nearly every web host gives you some way to upload files. Some web hosts pro­vide a web-based file man­ager; cPanel’s File Man­ager is a good example:

Most web hosts also give you the option to upload a file via File Trans­fer Pro­to­col (FTP). To do this you’ll want a spe­cial pro­gram, an ftp client. A few good ones:

• Cyber­duck (Mac only)
• FileZilla
• FireFTP (a Fire­fox extension)
• FTP Voy­ager (my per­sonal pick)

Other web hosts will give you other options too. “How do I upload files to my site” is a fre­quently asked ques­tion for web hosts, and that’s what FAQs are for. Any decent web host will make the answer to this ques­tion eas­ily avail­able to you in the Help or Sup­port sec­tion of their web­site. They don’t want to field emails and phone calls for such a com­mon need.

Once you’ve uploaded the file you should be able to access it through a URL that points to the file on your site. Share that with your col­leagues by email, or add a link on your web­site, and bam you’re done.

When to go Old School

If you already have a web host and you just want to share a few files, this is a great option.

Option 2: Social Media Sites

One of the main ideas behind social media is to democ­ra­tize web pub­lish­ing, mak­ing it pos­si­ble for any­one with a browser to cre­ate a web presence.

But that doesn’t just mean let­ting you pub­lish your online diaries and opin­ion pieces. Files are a part of express­ing your­self, and many social media plat­forms give you some way to upload cer­tain types of files. For example:

• Face­book lets you upload pho­tos and videos.
• LinkedIn lets you do major file-sharing if you add the Box.net appli­ca­tion.
• Spe­cial­ized sites like Flickr (pho­tos) and YouTube (videos) let you upload spe­cific types of files.

But of the social media options, blogs often give some of the best flex­i­bil­ity in the kinds of files you can upload.

For exam­ple, Word­Press allows a wide-though-not-unlimited range of file types: pic­tures, videos, audio, Word doc­u­ments, Open Office doc­u­ments, Pow­er­Points, and PDFs. In fact, some blog­ging plat­forms are flex­i­ble enough that they cross into the realm of Con­tent Man­age­ment Systems.

When to use Social Media

As with the Old School options, social media sites are great if they sup­port the kind of file you want to upload.

Option 3: Con­tent Man­age­ment Systems

You get even more flex­i­bil­ity if you move to a Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem (CMS). A higher-end CMS like Dru­pal or Joomla is a file man­age­ment beast, let­ting you not only upload nearly any kind of file, but also let­ting you clas­sify the files in var­i­ous ways to make it easy for peo­ple to find them. The trade-off: they’re more com­plex to set up and man­age than most of the other options listed here.

A few resources to help you to choose a CMS:

• Record­ing: Com­par­ing Open Source CMSs: Joomla, Dru­pal, and Plone: from nonprofit-centric research group IdealWare
• Com­par­ing Open Source CMSs: Word­Press, Joomla, Dru­pal and Plone: the sup­port­ing whitepa­per from IdealWare.
• OpenSourceCMS.com: lets you try out CMSs and a vari­ety of other Open Source tools.
• 10 Things To Con­sider When Choos­ing The Per­fect CMS: from the über web devel­op­ment site Smash­ing Magazine
• 10 Sim­ple and Light Weight CMS Solu­tions: a visit to the shal­lower end of the CMS pool

When yo use a CMS

A CMS is great if you have lots of files, or lots of kinds of files to upload. And it’s really the best solu­tion if you want to clas­sify the files in var­i­ous ways, let­ting peo­ple search for the files using those classifications.

Option 4: “Actual” File-Sharing Sites

I’ve saved the most obvi­ous for last.

Why? Some peo­ple have sim­ple file-sharing needs, but they assume they need a spe­cial­ized web­site to meet it. And file-sharing sites are great… but if you already have a web site and are able to upload files to it, there’s a cer­tain appeal to using the tools already at your disposal.

Desk­top Extensions

File-sharing sites give you online stor­age and an easy way to access it. Some ser­vices, like Drop­box, make this almost trans­par­ent: there’s sim­ply a new folder on your com­puter, and when­ever you drag files to/from that folder they’re actu­ally being uploaded/downloaded.

Not only does that give you an online backup of your files, or sim­ply make the files avail­able to you wher­ever you go, but in nearly all cases online stor­age sites give you a way to let oth­ers see your files.

Quick-n-Dirty

Some ser­vices, like Rapid­Share, are less focused on giv­ing you a space to share and retain lots of files over time, and more ori­ented toward quick and easy shar­ing of indi­vid­ual files. Rapid­Share sim­ply lets you upload a file (up to 200MB for free as of this writ­ing), then it gives you a URL that you can mail to your colleagues.

Choos­ing a Service

As with many online things, most of these sites give you free ser­vice with cer­tain restric­tions, and then they let you remove the restric­tions by pay­ing for a subscription.

Some of the best file-sharing sites:

• Drop­box
• Drop.io
• Rapid­share
• Megau­pload
• Google Docs: not only can you cre­ate col­lab­o­ra­tive doc­u­ments online, as I’ll dis­cuss in the next post, but Google recently started let­ting peo­ple upload any type of file to Google Docs, with a lim­i­ta­tion on the total space available.
• Win­dows Live Sky­Drive: Microsoft gives you 25GB of free space, and you can man­age it from Win­dows Explorer using the SDEx­plorer application.

Life­Hacker recently sur­veyed its read­ers about their favorite online stor­age tools. It’s good read­ing if you’re choos­ing between online file-sharing vendors.

When to use a file shar­ing service

It really comes down to whether the site offers some fea­ture that’s espe­cially appeal­ing to you, and how you feel about open­ing up yet another online account. If you use another tool already that allows file shar­ing, if you’re happy with it, and if it sup­ports the files and fea­tures you need… why switch?

On the other hand, file-sharing sites are great in many ways. They’re also eas­ier to use than some of the other options on this page, espe­cially those like Drop­box and Sky­Drive that let you man­age the files as though they were stored locally on your computer.

What’s Next?

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