MtnArch wrote:Jim Goodman has been perfecting this for quite a few years - hopefully he will chime in soon on how he makes it all work.
Alan is correct, our office has been working with a decentralized model since April of 2011. (I just realized that April 30 marks our 10th anniversary with Dropbox)
Our current team consists of 5 collaborators, all of which are in different physical locations - Capistrano Beach, San Clemente, Santa Ana, Costa Mesa and Sacramento California, Battle Creek, Michigan and Salt Lake, City, Utah.
We use Microsoft Teams, which is part of Office 365, as our primary communication tool. We also use Uberconference and Zoom for client and consultant meetings.
We use Dropbox Business Advanced as our office file server. We evaluated many options both free and paid, before settling on Dropbox. The main advantage of using Dropbox as a server is that there are no physical servers or VPNs to purchase and maintain.
Dropbox also maintains complete version history and all deleted files, so it eliminates the need for a separate backup scheme. I do maintain a separate, offline backup of our Dropbox server using Karin’s Replicator just in case of a Dropbox meltdown.
By far the biggest challenge is maintaining DataCAD’ s requirement for absolute paths for things like symbols, reference files, etc. Everyone on the team has to have their Dropbox account located on a drive with precisely the same path; ie K:\Dropbox (JGAIA). This gets a bit tricky for collaborators that have their own Dropbox accounts, but there are ways to make this work as well.
This method also works if you like to work in various locations. I spend July of every year at a Lake in Northern California and this setup allows me to be away from HQ for extended periods of time.
There may be other, less complicated and less expensive options for smaller teams like One Drive, Google Drive, etc. but
I realize that this outline will generate a whole list of questions, which I will try to answer as time permits. Hopefully, there will be some good suggestions on how we can refine our model as well.
Life is better on the cloud than in the digital dumps.