Many real estate professionals are now taking advantage of free storage space in the cloud, and have integrated services such as Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft Skydrive into their business.
In many cases, we utilize the latest and greatest apps. The problem is that we’re typically left with a plethora of individual apps, with no way of connecting the services and streamlining our data across multiple platforms.
However, I recently discovered a neat solution to this problem. Otixo is an app that allows you to consolidate all of your cloud storage services into one dashboard — think HootSuite for cloud storage.
Like other cloud storage providers — which offer a few gigabytes (GBs) of storage for free, and charge for additional space — Otixo utilizes a "freemium" model. But Otixo doesn’t store data on its servers. What it charges you for is how much bandwidth you use.
Bandwidth usage is the amount of data transfer utilized by accessing your files, similar to the data plan on your smartphone. Otixo gives you 2GB of bandwidth usage per month for free. You can upgrade to unlimited bandwidth usage for $9.99.
Otixo supports many popular cloud storage services including Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, Box and more. For the geeks out there, it also supports FTP (file transfer protocol) and WebDav, both useful for managing documents and files stored on servers.
The ability to connect via FTP was a pleasant surprise for me. This enables you to connect your website or real estate blog to the dashboard and easily streamline files from the cloud to your site.
Let’s take a look at some of the features available:
- The app features a clean, user-friendly dashboard and connecting services is a breeze. I’ve always admired how HootSuite consolidated multiple services with one user name and password. Otixo is efficient and can save a busy Realtor time.
- One of the best features of the app is the ability to copy and move files from one cloud storage service to another. For example, you can easily copy a file from your Dropbox account to Google Drive. This feature alone makes the app worth a try. You can also download, upload and preview files.
- There is a desktop app for Mac and Windows that allows you to access your files from your desktop. After inputting my credentials, I was able to quickly mount the Otixo drive to the dock on my Mac and use the "finder" to manage my files.
- Like most cloud services, Otixo lets you share files. However, the application features a workspace module for collaboration. Workspaces enable users working on a team to keep files in their cloud as well as exchanging files for collaboration. This is particularly helpful when working with clients or on a project.
- Although there is not a native mobile app, you can access Otixo via the mobile Web. I’ve found the app to function pretty well on iOS devices, particularly the iPad. However, I did experience glitches on the iPad when trying to launch a Keynote presentation. The presentation worked fine in preview mode but crashed numerous times when trying to launch from the Keynote app.
If you’re utilizing multiple cloud storage products and want to streamline your files across the board, Otixo has a ton of useful features that can help. Give it a try and let me know what you think. I’d love to hear your feedback.
