Guest blog by Andrew Cord
MBA student in finance at St. Edward’s University
Working, studying and spending time with family doesn’t leave a lot of time for meetings with teammates during my MBA program. If I didn’t have access to quality file storage sites that also allowed me to share with my teammates, then it would be nearly impossible to multitask like we must. During my undergraduate degree, I was lucky to have access to a great deal of storage space through The University of Texas, but I found that it was easier to work with groups through file-sharing services. I have since tried many different sites and services, and I am a fan of all of them. CX has some unique features that have made it stand out.
What my group mates and I look for when we are choosing a place to store our documents is somewhere that we can upload, edit, share, and save at any time, by any member of the group. With CX, I like that I can see real-time updates and literally have a document saved on my computer the moment one of my group mates finishes editing and saving it on the web.
Work in graduate school, especially in an MBA program, is about 70 percent group work. The ability to use online storage, and especially cloud-based storage, instead of just passing around a USB drive, has been so much easier and provided peace of mind about the safety of the documents. My classmates work, and I am looking for work when I’m not studying, so we usually only have about 4-6 hours per week to meet in person. We’re each working on assignments at odd hours of the day, and if we’re emailing each other 10-15 times a day, an important edit may get lost in attachments. It is so much better to have a program that allows us to edit and save online.
I also like how we can use the programs to add quick updates or ideas on the go. I have an iPhone 4S and an iPad 2, and the CX app allows me to throw something on there when I get an idea on the go and want to remember it. I even wrote and saved the rough draft of a project summary on my iPhone during a wedding reception. File sharing allows my group mates and I to do our work whenever we find the time and the means during our busy schedules.
I recently discovered CX, and so far I like what I see, especially the ability to return files. Recently, I accidentally deleted my Dropbox folder on my computer, and because it auto-syncs, it auto-deleted all of my files from the past 2 years. Thankfully, I had backed up all of the files that were on my computer in another place, but CX’s return files option would have prevented the issue to begin with.
My MBA program has been a learning experience about how to work with others, share with others, and remember to back up my information often and in many places. I’ll take those lessons and tried-and-true programs, like CX, with me as I embark on my business career.
