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If you are going to expect your employees to work off the clock, and to do so at home, in the car, in a hotel or the backyard, they are going to be far more effective and willing to do so if you make it as easy as possible. One way to do that is to provide them with a business-grade set of collaboration tools that make document sharing easy. Sending Word documents back and forth for markups among a group is tedious and is a recipe for version control tragedies.

What’s going on in your organization? Have you ever considered that your file sharing environment is a critical client touchpoint? Consider these questions:

• Can they learn the system quickly?
• Is it used across the entire organization, or do individual units use different tools?
• Can a client access via any mobile device whenever it is convenient?
• Is everything accessible via all operating systems?
• Do they feel secure sharing confidential data?

Sharing and collaboration should be easy, intuitive and secure.

When an employee needs to share information, how are they doing it? There is a good chance they are emailing Word docs or PDFs, texting attachments or using any type of file sharing product they are familiar with. Perhaps when they work collaboratively with a client, they use whatever the client is familiar with.

An important factor in corporate security is implementing an FSS solution that provides not only ease of use, but the highest level of security available. A good FSS platform eliminates the need to email files. It also creates optional levels of access that includes password protection, view only and download permissions.

Very simply, FSS is a software service that allows you to share all manner of files, documents, spreadsheets and images within an organization as well as with outside third parties, such as customers and prospects. For the average user, the benefit is the ability to work collaboratively using any device or operating system, without having to figure out how to make that all work. However, there is more to a holistic FSS than ease of use. There are 3 key aspects to any complete FSS platform.

1) Collaboration:

These are features such as:

• Easy access to documents, from anywhere, at any time.
• All changes to any file are immediately synced across all devices and file servers without any active intervention by the customers.
• No size limits.
• Integration with your existing systems, such as Salesforce, Outlook and Microsoft 365.

2) Security:

This is the “behind the scenes” part of a complete FSS solution. File sharing for businesses should be easy and totally transparent. However, it must also be secure. Most importantly, it needs to be meeting industry standards for security. Consumer-grade sharing tools for family photos aren’t appropriate in a business setting. Effective security should include encryption that covers all three points in the content lifecycle: in-session, transit and on-device.

3) Mobile:

Collaboration isn’t effective until you permit universal mobile access that is simple to use. This is the final key to an enterprise FSS platform. As people are pushing their work to mobile from every location imaginable, the ability to access via iOS and Android is an absolute requirement, along with the entire file sharing process. Features such as automated document QR coding make it easy to quickly find a document from a small screen device.

The availability of these features is a great starting point for your organization to discuss broader policies for determining access.

First, what is it? Two-factor authentication requires two different forms of identification to verify an employee. In general, the idea behind it is that the two forms of identification aren’t necessarily closely linked to each other: the possession of one form of ID doesn’t reveal the factor in the other ID.

What does this have to do with File Sync & Share (FSS) platforms? Organizations routinely share very confidential files among employees as well as third parties. All this sharing is occurring on external networks and via a wide variety of non-secure devices. This means the security that is built into an FSS platform is exceptionally important.

If you answered yes, here are four reasons to stop doing this:

1. Time delays – Edits cannot happen in real time. You write the document, send it, they review and edit it, add comments, then they send it back to you. You receive it and make the changes, then send a revised version back to them. Meanwhile, they’ve moved on to some other task. Now you’re waiting for their second review.
2. Version control – Each time you create or edit a Word doc, you save it before you send it. And the recipient who edits it does the same. No matter how careful you may be with naming protocols, the fact remains that there are multiple versions of that document out there, and there is no guarantee that an older version won’t be used or distributed improperly.
3. Lack of collaboration – Because reviews can’t take place in real time, there cannot be any real-time, on-screen “conversation” among collaborators, increasing the potential for miscommunication and a poor flow of ideas in the document.
4. Impractical for life on the move – When you’re offsite and mobile, it’s frustrating to have to try to make edits to a document that can only be accessed from one machine.

Are they collaborating with clients over different platforms?

Sharing files via email, text and consumer-grade File Sync & Share (FSS)?

Aside from the security risks you are taking and the (in)convenience factor, is this really putting the company in the best light?

Think about the impact to your branding when you share files with a client using clunky, hard-to-use tools, methods that risk data security, or unintuitive platforms that require a learning curve for your clients and prospects. You inconvenience them and you put their files at risk. It sends a negative message—one that could harm your brand.