How to Use Free Dropbox and Asana for Live Document Collaboration

English Forum Use Cases
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Maybe everybody knows this from the Asana documentation and use of Dropbox but I am documenting for my own files my experience.

  1. As everyone knows you can attach documents from Dropbox to Asana
  2. If you create a folder in your Personal Free Dropbox and share it with any people that are commenting or adding to a document and;
  3. They also have dropbox
  4. Other users will be able to make comments on the documents and “Open” the document to make additions. If they Save the document for example in Word, it then becomes the active document attachment in Asana thus a form of collaboration.
  5. I understand having a corporate account in Dropbox or Box allows much more security and features but along with that is a cost**

This is my simple way to share a document using Free Dropbox and my tested results for the Asana update. Hope it helps for those who did not know. As I said this is basic document collaboration.

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Thanks for sharing!

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We use Google Docs for collaboration, which has a few advantages over Dropbox for us:

  1. Almost everyone is familiar with Google already, even if they haven't used Drive/Docs before.
  2. Everyone creates a Google account with their work address. (Note that you can use an email address as a Google username without Google/Gmail handing mail for that address.) It's easy to switch between multiple Google accounts during the day.
  3. One person creates a folder in Google Drive and shares it with everyone else. We have a doc in the root level of the folder with naming conventions for files and folders.
  4. If you're already logged into your Google account, you can log into Asana without typing a name and password again. Since you have to be logged into Google to see the files anyway, this means everyone stays logged into Google and Asana with less typing and fewer clicks. (Note that you still have to create an Asana username and password the first time you create your Asana account, but then you can use Google from that point on to login to Asana.)
  5. We attach the appropriate Google Docs to projects and tasks. This way everyone is always looking at the same version of the file, which is a huge improvement over emailing files. We put non-Google files in Google Drive too, and then attach them to Asana from Google rather than attaching them to Asana directly. This keeps all the files in the same place for easy browsing, since Asana is not intended as a document management system. It also serves as some redundancy in case Asana is ever unavailable (or we ever need to leave the platform :cry: ).
  6. Google has features very similar to Track Changes in Microsoft Word, which let us make suggestions and comments. It's also very easy to look at or revert to previous versions of documents.
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