LAZY MAN SYNCING ON MULTIPLE MACS using hazel and dropbox

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I keep customer files online via dropbox where my office manager and staff access and update them on a daily basis. My officer manager's iMac is the office workhorse and on her iMac desktop we have a folder - we called it OFFICE INBOX) - we use the OFFICE INBOX folder to set up tons of hazel rules to sort customer information into the correct online folder and other actions.

Rather than set up identical hazel rules on multiple macs to deal with all these these customer files, I have made the following lazy workaround:

On my laptop, I make a folder (I call mine CUSTOMER INBOX) on dropbox that I share with my office manager and other staff ( if you do not know how to set up a shared folder on dropbox , check out www.dropbox.com)

I put all the pdfs I have scanned about various customer into the "CUSTOMER INBOX”. Likewise staff members who share this folder can also put customer pdfs into this shared folder.

On my office manager’s iMac I open hazel : Under Folders - I click to add the folder CUSTOMER INBOX (remember you need to first select the dropbox folder to reach & then select the desired subfolder within dropbox). Now I need to set up hazel rule for the CUSTOMER INBOX folder.

The rule I set up ( I called the rule “move to office inbox”) applies the following conditions:
any of the following conditions are met:
extension: is pdf
Do the following to the matched file or folder:
move: to OFFICE INBOX ( remember to select desktop folder to reach and then select the OFFICE INBOX folder sitting on the desktop).

You can obviously broaden the use of this shared folder to include more than pdf - choose the extension that apply to your needs. Remember only my office manager’s iMac is using hazel rules , people using non-macs can put stuff on the shared CUSTOMER INBOX folder.

FYI : I OCR on all my pdfs which allows me to make lots of rules using “content contains” conditions to move and rename files. Hope this is useful to folks.
noradris
 
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Joined: Wed Jan 22, 2014 7:11 pm

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