which cloud to use?

[Escallonia]

I want to do document sharing with a random group of people. I have gmail but none of them do - I reckon they will be put off if they have to sign up for a gmail account.

is there any way to do this cloud thing without having to go and set up your own account somewhere - ie just share a username and password, or just do your own username and password without finding that you then have a new email account you didn't want, as it were.

Either way, is Google good or are there better places to look?

Thanks!

I don't think there is any service that will let you share a username and password. There are valid security reasons for this.

A number of services let you sign up using your own email account.

Does dropbox fit your purpose? I use it all the time and it works transparently for synching my own files across workstations, which is it's main role, but it also lets you share synced folders transparently which might do what you want.

If not, try box.net.

If you want something you don't have to sign up for, try drop.io or mediafire, but this might not give you enough privacy for your project.

Otherwise one of the project mangagment services might fit the bill - I like TeamworkPM but Basecamp is the market leader (no file sharing on their free plan though).

thanks - will look into it all when I get a chance. I think we need a service which lets people sign up regardless of their email provider.

thanks also NetworkGuy for the PM, most helpful.

All those I mentioned let you sign up using your own email. I think it's only Google Docs and Microsoft Office Live or whatever they are calling it this week that make you sign up for Gmail/Hotmail respectively.

Dropbox is brilliant and will do what you need. Alternatively, dropbox can also give any file it's own URL. So you add your document into the public folder, rightclick and get the the dropbox public URL and share that with the people you want to access the document.

For example dl.dropbox.com/u/7838007/How%20to%20use%20the%20Public%20folder.rtf