Project Red

We're looking at launching a small pilot of MacBook Airs in November with two 6th grade classrooms with our full middle school launch, 6 through 8, 700 students. Next fall, we launch at the high school with another 850 students.

We were looking at using a Dropbox solution with the students so files could live on both their devices and be backed up in the cloud for all the obvious reasons. Our ISD, who is supporting our technology, is concerned that the Dropbox client on that many machines will overwhelm the Cisco APs and crash our network. They are not worried about the bandwidth, but rather the internal network handling syncing.

The question we can't get an answer to is: Does Dropbox (Google Drive or Skydrive, etc.,) constantly talk to check for changes, or does the client only initiate a sync when it recognizes a local change. Somehow, if a file is changed in the Cloud, it must communicate with the local client of that change so the sync can take place. I haven't even talked with them about iCloud (I fear for my life...).

Does anyone have a cloud based sync system in place, or know of any district successfully implementing this type of solution?

Michael

We had San Marcos Unified use Dropbox to archive and share files in their elementary iPad 1:1 pilots. It worked fine, but it wasn't at the scale you are planning. How much syncing will happen will also depend on how many people are shared on the folders that are created in Dropbox. If students are collaborating on documents, they can do that in Google Docs without having to worry about syncing to local folder. I see Dropbox more for sharing completed assignments with a teacher, or for students archiving their own work. I would call Dropbox directly and discuss what you are planning. They may have examples of large scale business or education deployments and any issues that may have come up with network capacity.

Why not just set up a shared folder system on your network and keep everything on your cloud/server? Students could still download a file to the device if they want to work offline. You actually could also use Dropbox the same way, as a web based solution, without having the local folder.

I'm just thinking off the top of my head here. Again, I would call Dropbox and tell them what you are thinking.

While we are a small school, my guess is that the AP loads are similar. We may have 120 users online across 4 access points (Cisco) and all use DropBox. We have not experienced any issues that point to DropBox.