After announcing their collaborative document editing system called Paper in August last year, Dropbox has today launched the system in full along with a new sync system for business teams to easily access their files on the desktop rather than through a browser.
Paper is a collaborative document editing system they are hoping will rival the big guns such as Google with Docs, or Microsoft with Office 365, allowing customers to access and edit documents anywhere.
Since its introduction, Dropbox says millions of Paper documents have been created by people and businesses. They’ve used the beta phase to find out what customers are doing with Paper, and add features including an option to instantly turn documents into slides for a presentation or an option to create and share meeting notes. They’ve also introduced new features today including :
- 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
While Paper is free to use, some of the more advanced features of Paper, like the ability to track what happens after you click ‘Share’ on a document is being limited to business/enterprise customers.
There’s another tool which they’ve launched today, but before you get excited it appears to only be available to Dropbox Business customers. SmartSync is a new tool that aims to let you share, access and sync your files from any Windows or Mac file manager. The aim is to help users by getting rid of the need to jump in and out of the web browser by just using the native file explorer on their PC.
SmartSync is currently only available for business users, but Dropbox is looking at options for individual users.
Dropbox has a big fight on their hands to move customers away from entrenched collaborative document editing, but they’ve already snared some big names like Ben & Jerry’s (yep, the ice-cream company) as well as more familiar names in the tech industry like Patreon and Shopify. If you’d like to check out Paper, you can download the app or head to dropbox.com/paper.
Dropbox need enterprise customers, but their number one problem is the appalling support they provide. I’ve had the misfortune to use Dropbox at work under a corporate account, and the support they provide to fee-paying enterprise customers is atrocious. They simply have not made the leap from what they can get away with providing free customers to what is expected from corporates who are paying for the service.