This Week: We’re looking at three tech tools that I use in Multisite Church that are indispensable, free and provide immediate productivity boost.

Every once in a while I bump into technology that really is magical.  It does something that is just beyond my understanding on how it works.  Today’s tool for Multisite really is magical.

DropBox is an easy to use file hosting service that enable users to store and share files and folders with others across the Internet using file synchronization.

After a quick installation DropBox make a new folder on your computer and keeps that synched up online . . . you can share items in that folder with anyone else who has access to the internet.

DropBox saves our bacon in a number of ways:

• Most of our weekend service assets are done by Wednesday at noon so we can pass the computers on for our staff who don’t work out of our central office, but if anything takes a little longer to make our creative team uses it to share the files online.
• Our video guys have a huge DropBox (50 Gig) and will often render out videos at the end of the day to the DropBox which means we can all see the videos that evening after they’ve rendered.  A nice use of technology to help balance life and work . . . we normally would have waited at the office for it to finish rendering.
• We have a distributed workforce literally around the world (I’ll do a post on that in the future at some point.) and use DropBox to collaborate on everything from expense reports to message writing.

There are really three major uses for DropBox:

• File Backup – You can use it to synch those documents you want to make sure won’t go away if your computer does.
• File Synching – If you have two computers – you can use it make sure you have access to your core documents on both computers.  (Even if one is a Mac and the other is a PC!)
• File Sharing – The ability to work on documents together with a work team.

Like all the tools we’ve been talking about this week . . . DropBox is free!  You can get a free 2 gig DropBox today by simply following this link and signing up today!

Are you in Multisite church world and use DropBox all the time?  Tell us about a time when it saved your bacon!

Next week we’re going to going to look at our Christmas Offering from Liquid . . . I’ll peak under the hood and let you know some of the stuff I learned this year.  Subscribe to the blog through email and you’ll get exclusive bonus content.