Can Brother Printer Beat Dropbox At Online Document Management?

Brother International, best known for printers, has launched yet another online offering for small businesses - BR-DOCS which is an online document storage solution. From what I can tell similar to Box and Dropbox.

BR-DOCS is optimized to work with Brother Printers, a plus for those using Brother Printers and enables three broad capabilities:

• Manage all files in one secure location. Users can control and create groups, provide access and conduct key word searches to find files. Users can also assign tasks to automate workflow management
• Collaborate with colleagues by creating specific workspaces to invite users, add documents, assign and manage content. Users can also initiate discussions across the entire organization
• Digitize documents by scanning and saving searchable files and provide access to clients who are not BR-Docs users

Dropbox and Box hold commanding leads in the online file storage market. Like Microsoft Word, “everyone” is using Dropbox which further pushes an exponential number of MORE users to use Dropbox - to be compatible.

So what’s the upside of BR-DOCS over competing services?

BR-DOCS offers the ability to tag documents, thus searching for them more easily and it appears to enable great control over how the documents are shared.

If you’re simply looking for a file sharing tool - just about any online file sharing service will work. But if you’re looking for a document management solution - you should consider BR-DOCS and other robust solutions such as those from Neat, Fujitsu, Epson and Lexmark.