Huge Picks File-Sharing System for Global Teamwork

By William Atkinson

Huge, Inc., an end-to-end digital advertising agency, provides strategy, design and development services for high-profile clients that include HBO, IKEA, PepsiCo and Toyota. With offices in the U.S., Europe and South America, the Brooklyn-based company’s operations are dependent on the ability to effectively exchange ideas and information among 480 team members around the world.

First and foremost, Huge needed a way to quickly and easily share large files among staff, and across different devices. Employees are dispersed geographically, and the data being shared is often very big, so it was becoming increasingly difficult for the company to conduct business.

Huge began searching for a solution that would allow the company to keep its existing workflows intact. It experimented with an open source solution, but found that the management and cost requirements, including the need for international staff, were too expensive.

Huge selected Dropbox for Business, a system that would easily integrate with the company’s existing workflows and provide it with the space and freedom it needed to share large files and accommodate a growing number of employees and clients in a variety of locations.

Users would be able to share high-definition graphics and videos, regardless of size. In addition, files could be locked and controlled to keep work correctly distributed, and deleted files could be restored.

“One thing we liked about Dropbox for Business was that a lot of our people were already using Dropbox for their personal accounts or linked to their company e-mail accounts, so they were already used to it,” says David Stahl, IT director for Huge. “Since we already knew that Dropbox in general worked well, it made sense to adopt Dropbox for Business.”

Implementation was relatively flawless. “It was pretty easy to integrate,” Stahl says. “There was no need to migrate anything. It was just a matter of setting up the account and setting up the users.” Another reason for the ease of implementation was, as noted earlier, that a large percentage of Huge employees already had personal Dropbox accounts, and found it easy to move their personal accounts to the new Huge account.

Many of the Huge’s employees work with different types of equipment. Now, by working with data in Dropbox for Business, they can synchronize it with their laptops and desktops. This alleviates the need for IT to provide a solution to ensure multiple devices are in sync. “People can access files from their desktops or workstations at work, as well as from home,” says Stahl. “That kind of portability has been very important.”

Sharing software on Dropbox for Business also made updates easier for the IT group. For example, when IT needs to get software out to remote sites, it simply uses Dropbox. It’s also made document management less painful. In the past, when people shared files using e-mail or an FTP site, different versions of files would exist, meaning that people weren’t always working on one main file. “Dropbox for Business solved this collaboration issue,” says Stahl.

Since Dropbox for Business allows users to share data in a secure fashion, just by sending a link, instead of having to set up specific directories when they want to send a file, it speeds up the process of collaboration between Huge’s team and third parties.

The Dropbox for Business storage system, for example, provides benefits for Huge during external meetings with clients. Members of the Huge team often need to request that a file be placed in Dropbox for Business, so they can download it onto a client’s system. The technology provides them with the flexibility to show work they didn’t bring, which previously would have required e-mailing or trying to FTP it. With Dropbox for Business, Huge team members can immediately share the file with a client.