Dropbox vs OneDrive: How Expedia rolled out Dropbox in two weeks to remove legacy file sharing

Around 30 per cent of staff were already using personal Dropbox accounts in preference to OneDrive, Expedia embraced shadow IT rather than eschew it

Online travel company Expedia rolled out Dropbox globally in a base project that took less than two weeks, starting with 'power users' of a legacy file-sharing product, rather than insist that staff use the OneDrive file-storage space that comes with Office 365.

The company selected Dropbox over OneDrive partly because staff appeared to be more familiar with Dropbox, while also enabling staff to choose what they used for cloud file storage under a 'champion versus challenger' IT policy.

"We wanted to empower our workforce and make them more collaborative and more productive; we really wanted to search and find a solution that allowed collaboration to occur on their devices regardless of platform," Chris Burgess, vice president of IT at Expedia, told Computing.

"We were largely leveraging email to collaborate and share files and documents, and/or having a lot of documents stored on either file shares in data centres or their machines," he added. More than that, though, a high percentage of users were resorting to a variety of consumer file sharing services in order to do help get work done: Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, OneDrive and even Mega.

Indeed, an analysis of network traffic made it pretty clear that users were resorting to a variety of personal file sharing accounts in order to more easily do their work from any device. But Dropbox was the most popular, said Burgess.

"Dropbox usage was stronger in our organisation and if we could leverage that it would make training our user base and our transition to the enterprise business product much easier. We've actually found that in terms of the adoption as well," he said.

Hence, instead of condemning this example of 'shadow IT', Burgess decided that the company should embrace it. Besides, bringing in the most widely used legacy file-sharing app, Burgess suggested, ought to make the transition easier. It also provided a solid business case for introducing Dropbox.

"Going back about a year we had around 18,000 employees at the time and 30 per cent or so had a Dropbox instance of some kind. We didn't delve too deeply into how much of that was personal use, but we figured that there was a significant part of that usage that had personal information," said Burgess.

Managing the transition so that staff were not antagonised, on the one hand, while the company remained compliant in terms of both staff data privacy, on the other could have been a handle.

"One of the great things about the migration for us was that the personal data, the corporate data and the accounts would essentially co-exist on those devices. That made the transition much simpler, so we could then split that data and our employees could keep their personal data separate from the corporate data," said Burgess.

What made it easier was the fact that Dropbox already had most of the existing data, and this could simply be shifted by migrating it from one account (the personal account) to another account (the corporate account) by members of staff. Hence, fears that a deluge of data might saturate the network as people started using their Dropbox accounts largely didn't materialise.

While staff haven't been barred from using OneDrive, Dropbox has nevertheless been soundly preferred by users over Microsoft OneDrive.

"With Dropbox, we've seen the number of terabytes of data storage and the number of shared folders growing exponentially," Burgess told Computing. "We see Dropbox usage growing at a far more rapid rate than some of the alternatives."

Today, with the company's headcount having dramatically increased, Burgess estimates that around 18,000 out of the company's enlarged headcount of 25,000 are now active users of Dropbox at Expedia under its various different brands worldwide.