Dropbox pushes against Microsoft in business market with new features and a new approach

Kit McDonald

Dropbox is attempting to “transform” their file sharing experience to break into the business market. As Business Insider reports, even though only 200,000 of its 500 million users are business customers, it seems the company is willing to follow in the footsteps of Microsoft’s OneDrive for Business. The company posted a blog post today emphasizing the importance of managing and accessing files in the workplace.

In fact, Dropbox announced that it has new services and products on the chopping block specifically for the business perspective. Their new web experience for Dropbox Business is available through an early access program starting today and streamline accessing files faster. It also has an activity manager for seeing which team members have viewed, shared, and edited recently.

Sound familiar? OneDrive for Business recently demoed the same thing.

The file sharing platform also highlighted Dropbox Paper, the real-time doc sharing tool. While it has been in open beta for half of a year, they have recently decided to bring it to ‘full release’ with a large update of features:

  • Collaborate across the globe: Paper is now available in 21 languages on the web (coming soon to mobile)
  • Keep your team on track: Moving projects along is easier than ever now that you can assign due dates when you make task lists
  • Get organized: With projects, your team’s work is organized in a single, shared place. An early preview of projects will be rolling out to select teams starting today.
  • Work from anywhere: Paper iOS and Android apps will soon give you offline access

With this and Smart Sync adding seamless access across all files from hard drive to the cloud, it’s clear that Dropbox is bringing their A game to Microsoft and its other competitor Google.

It will be interesting to see the battle between these file sharing platforms as businesses begin to convert. Which do you think is doing it better? Let us know in the comments below or tweet us @OnMSFT