Persistent Shared Links (Regardless of the status of the user who created the link)

Our organization is approximately 45 people. Among other many other uses, we use Dropbox to share links with one another. This helps us locate documents in Windows File Explorer (regardless of the local path on a given machine) and sometimes to support needs on projects. Something we learned the hard way recently is that Dropbox links only last as long as the user who created them. This was extremely disappointing to learn.

We were building a database for a project that had thousands of person-hours in it. Crucially, this database needs to live on for our client beyond our involvement. Each row referred to a location on our shared drive where an asset was located. As there are storage limitations within the database platform we were using (AirTable), it made sense to share a link to the location on Dropbox where it was stored. Bonus points that we could control access to that asset on Dropbox's side, rather than having to filter out through access controls within the database.

This worked well until we noticed some links were leading to errors we had never seen before. We troubleshooted for some time until we realized all of the broken links were created by users who were no longer with our company. On a project like this, most of the grunt-work was done by temporary interns. This led us to the realization that Dropbox is ill-suited to this task because links are related only to the user, not to the organization paying for the subscription.

We have now had to ask our client for a scope change to bring on a different cloud software because of this strange (and frustrating) behaviour. We are testing Google Drive, Box, and One Drive. If any of these platforms allow persistent links, we will be seriously considering moving our entire organization over. Shared links in shared drives should persist indefinitely (or as long as the organization exists and is paying for a dropbox subscription).