IPad – Corporate alternatives to DropBox for iPad

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I am currently the only iPad user in a large company, and am loving using it, especially for meetings. I keep a lot of information relevant to meetings on DropBox, such as minutes, reports, spreadsheets and so on, and tend to refer to them a lot. I like the fact that I can easily navigate my own directory tree in DropBox, and view common file formats on there. However, whilst I have permission to use dropbox for the files I use, I find that I am limited in scope with some meetings, as I'm not allowed to place others on servers that don't belong to the company. I end up having to either bring a laptop, or, more commonly, look over somebody else's shoulder.

So, can anyone recommend a solution similar to Dropbox that would work for shares on Windows Server 2003, and allow me to:

  • Easily navigate a directory tree, possibly with shortcuts to commonly-used folders
  • View files in MS Office 2003 and 2007 formats and PDFs without lengthy conversion processes
  • Not have to go through an intermediate "copy to the iPad" step that I might find with, say GoodReader or Quickoffice

I'd ideally lie a solution that works on the company wifi network without further modification of the current server architecture, though I can see that in the future, it may need to work over a secure VPN connection from the field if a few other managers decide to take the plunge, so something that's preferably easy for our system administrators to configure and support. A proxy solution that would work in Linux or Windows is possible.

Best Answer

A search on the iTunes store for SMB file browsers finds something called - ahem - FileBrowser that sounds like what you need. Haven't tried it myself - although thinking about it something like this might be a help in my workflow. Did I just cost myself $3 by answering a question?

It's at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/filebrowser-access-files-on/id364738545?mt=8