I manage a small film company, and I've become increasingly confused and frustrated trying to create collaborative folders where our crews can upload footage and audio without it requiring them to personally purchase a tremendous amount of storage for their own personal Dropbox.
We have different independent contractors filming for different projects -- not everyone is a full employee of the company, so I don't want to make everyone a full Teams member and give them access to all of our Teams files. But if I add them as a collaborator on a specific Teams folder, it still necessitates that they use their own personal Dropbox storage, even though our company is already paying for 12 TB of storage on Teams.
After going back and forth with Dropbox support, the solution we found was to create a File Request, which is a completely separate function than inviting someone to be a Teams member or Teams collaborator. While File Request provides the functionality I want, it's simply not intuitive that it is its own separate function. The entire draw of Teams for us was being able to create folders people could upload to without having to use their own personal Dropbox storage, and it's frustrating that even after paying a significant monthly fee for the service as well as per team member, I still have to find these little workarounds to access what to me ought to be a very straightforward functionality of any file-sharing or file-management service built for businesses.
I think the File Request should cease to be its own function and should be collapsed into being a collaborator on a Teams folder. To me it is so obvious that if someone is a collaborator in a folder that I am hosting on my Teams account, they should be able to upload to it without having to take any additional steps or purchase any additional storage, when I have already purchased that storage. Why would anyone ever be a collaborator otherwise -- what is the point of "collaborator" as it currently exists?
We sent the File Request to resolve the issue presently, but we've already begun moving most of our online storage and collaborations to Google Drive, which is just much much more straightforward. Until Dropbox streamlines and simplifies this issue I can't see how it makes sense for a business to use it.
