In extremely non-political news, prepare for a brief soliloquy on the flexibility of various cloud services when you need both family and team level flexibility to avoid a sea of duplicate logins
Both my partner and I have reasonable amounts of complexity in how we wrangle files and use our devices. The usual mix of desk/laptop devices for each of us, and mobile/tablet stuff. Some play, lots of work. She’s a writer and editor, I do IA/Tech/Strategy stuff.
As a lot of folks know, I also do @autogram_is with @karenmcgrane and @beep, so “running a small business” and “wrangling client stuff” is part of that, too.
Most of the time, the services I need fall into “Catherine and I use them” OR “Autogram uses them”…
In those situations, most cloud services have decent Team or Family plans that centralize billing and make things simple to manage. But when both apply, it gets tangled.
This is top of mind because Dropbox just announced a ‘Dropbox Family Plan’ (https://www.dropbox.com/plans). For the moment, I think it might just make sense to keep everyone on personal plans and rely on shared folders, but that’s disappointing.
The absolute king of cloud services is @1Password — you can create a personal account, upgrade it to a family account, invite guests to share specific one-off collections of credentials, OR set up a team account… each seat of which comes with a free family account.
And… let us not speak of Google Drive.
All of this, of course, gets flat out non-euclidean if you are working as an independent contractor on multiple teams simultaneously. Either you hope each team has their act together, or you essentially form an LLC and put on your I Do Processes Now hat. c’est la vie
(I’m breaking a million rules by spawning off a sub-thread here, but: Google Drive is fantastic for organizing Google Cloud documents but in our experience it turns into a real tangle if used to manage other kinds of documents, especially if they’re frequently edited)
i.e., keeping your Keynote decks in a Google Drive folder breaks down in a million ways; Dropbox has really truly mastered the “It’s a folder that just appears everywhere” effect, Drive is much more “You can download and re-upload stuff easily”