From the course: InDesign: Remote Workflows with InCopy, Word, and Google Docs

Cloud sharing strategies

- [Instructor] As I said in the previous video about using a local server, if that's not going to work for you, you don't have a local server, it's too hard for remote users to get access, then the other option is to use a cloud service like Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint, Box, Creative Cloud, iCloud, there's more, there's open-source ones, all sorts of things. But the main thing is that instead of a server, your files are on a hard drive in the cloud that is in somebody's server farm, some remote location, just like a website is served on a remote location. Your files will be stored there. They are encrypted and they're only available if you have been given access with a password. And the idea is that everybody who wants to participate in the collaborative workflow and needs access, read-write access to the same set of files, get an account on that cloud service. And so they can not just log in on the web, but they can install the software that comes with these services. Often it's optional software that they install on their Mac or Windows machine that will duplicate what is in the cloud. And they can choose only to duplicate or sync items in the production folder, for example, and not everything that's on the cloud. Not all of these cloud servers are created equal. The ones that I've had the best experience with for myself and for my clients over the years are Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive. Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive offers this sharing of locally synced folders with other members of your work group. All of them offer that as one of their free plans. So it costs nothing to get started. The other services like SharePoint, which is part of Teams, which is kind of based on OneDrive, Microsoft's cloud sharing solution, that works pretty well, but they're just a little bit more challenging and limited. All right. So you might say, well, wait a minute, what about SharePoint? I use SharePoint, but SharePoint requires an IT admin to set up. It's not something that the users can create themselves usually. And it's harder to allow people who are not members of your team access. So if you have an outside designer or an outside writer and you want them to be able to participate, the IT person has to give them access. I have another video where I talk in more detail about SharePoint. Creative Cloud that comes with Adobe, people are always surprised that it's not really the best solution. And there is one part of Creative Cloud called Creative Cloud Files that is supposed to be for this kind of collaborative workflow and it works more or less if you have a Creative Cloud account. Box, I've heard, does pretty well with this kind of service. But I have never used it for a group effort, just for myself. So I can't really say anything about it. And iCloud, similar to Creative Cloud, except that it's limited to Mac users, and so it's not really that robust. Now I have some steps, eight actually, to help you collaborate successfully with the cloud service. A lot of times after I demo using Google Drive or Dropbox to a company, they follow up within a week or two saying, how do we do this again? So, because I've done it so often, it's second nature. So I'm going to write down the steps that you need to do. First of all, you have to choose one vendor. You can't have some people use Dropbox and some people use Google Drive. They can have that installed. They can have two or more solutions installed, but for your production collaborative workflow, everybody uses one, one vendor. And then each one of those users in your team has to create an account with that vendor. So let's use Dropbox. As an example, everybody goes to Dropbox and signs up for a free account. If that's how you want to start out. You might want to pop for a business account and go ahead and distribute that to your team if you want. But let's just say that it's a group of people who create a free Dropbox account. And then also from that service, they download and install the software. I'll be talking about this in detail in other videos coming up, but you have to install the software, you can't just use the website. It has to be something local. And usually you need to install software that hooks in with that website. Now, if you're using SharePoint or something else, this might already be set up for you. That's what I'm saying, if necessary. Then in that folder, on your desktop, in that Dropbox folder, somebody, let's say the admin creates a sub folder, calls it production and shares it. Usually you right click and say share this folder. And you enter the email addresses of everybody else on the team. The email addresses that they used to sign up for the service. So sometimes that's different from their work email address. So you have to keep track of that. All the other users will be given a notification, usually by email, that they've been invited to a share and they need to accept it. And so now what happens is that everybody has the same folder. Let's call it the production folder inside their Dropbox folder on their computer. Then step number six, the users need to test adding files to that production folder, opening up them up from there, editing them, saving them, making sure that it's all working copacetically, right? They also need to test opening up other people's files. So I put a Word file there. Joe puts a Word file there. And then we switch and I opened Joe's file and he opens mine. We make changes. We save, we close. We see if we can see each other's changes. Do we all have read-write access to all the files? That's what we want to make sure before we actually start trying to create a publication. Okay. Finally, I suggest that you set up a backup routine. I'm a big believer in belts and suspenders. Even though the system is designed to be a backup, Dropbox, Google Drive, SharePoint, they're all supposed to have maintain backups for you, and they do. What happens if something goes bluey, really? What happens? If you're using a network file server, there's an IT person who is making sure that they're doing offsite backups of that server. If you are using a cloud service, it's up to you to create an external backup of what is on your hard drive from that service even if it's just a, you know, $50 hard drive with Time Machine running it for Macintosh, that is perfectly fine, but it's good to have a backup just in case.

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