Sharing Your Files at Work Safely

There are many ways to share your files at work:

• flash drives - safe, but inconvenient to be passing the flash drive back and forth.
• CD's - ditto. Plus, unless they are rewriteable, it's not green.
• shared external drives - for example, an external USB drive. It's a good solution if the drive comes with software that secures permissions for the drive or if there isn't anything stored on the drive that can't be seen by the whole company.
• peer-to-peer networking - setting up shared folders. I never ever recommend this in a business environment. At home, it's ok, but in business it's simply not safe. It's easy for prying eyes to get into the files. Also, the computer where the files are store cannot be turned off because the connection is easily broken. If the computer storing the files gets infected, other computers connecting to it risk infection. If the hard drive crashes on the computer where the files are stored, the files for everyone may be lost. If the hard drive of the sharing computer doesn't have a lot of space, it will reduce performance on the sharing computer slowing it down. You have to check that the computer has room for other people's files on it.
• domain fileshares - this is the most secure. The setup takes some effort to set up groups and assign permissions, but it's the safest. It requires the expense of a server operating system and server hardware.
• web office spaces- Microsoft live space, Google Docs, or a shared DropBox account. This is a free and safe option for filesharing.

When sharing files at work make sure you runs scans on the flash drives or CD's prior to opening files on them. You don't know how cautious the person sharing files is about their virus protection.