By: Nick Gambino
Gone are the days of simple Dropbox. The cloud service started with a not-overzealous ambition – to be a tool for backing up or saving your files in the cloud. Now they’ve set their sights on something a lot more ambitious – becoming the central location for your entire workflow – and I like it.
Dropbox just announced a major overhaul to its design and function on Windows and Mac. The idea is to allow you to conduct all of your business and collaborative efforts under the singular umbrella of Dropbox. That goes for using other apps like Microsoft Word and other collaborative tools like Google Docs. This is world domination type stuff.
“It’s the Dropbox you know and love, but better,” reads a Dropbox blog post. “It’s a single workspace to organize your content, connect your tools, and bring everyone together, wherever you are.”
This video explains it best:
If Dropbox has its way, you’ll be able to execute solo and collaborative projects without ever leaving its new and improved app. You can create and work in Google and Microsoft documents and spreadsheets, then share those. You can communicate through “competitor” app Slack, video conference through Zoom and project manage through Atlassian. By piggybacking on these services, they have no need to build up these capabilities from the bottom up.
Easily the most user-friendly feature that comes with this shiny new Box is the ability to search within those integrated apps right from the search function in Dropbox. So if you’re looking for a specific document or conversation, searching in Dropbox will show it up.
This is all geared toward a collaborative team design. They’ve even included a team activity feed that allows you to see what everybody’s doing on the project. This is in addition to numerous other small features they’ve added including @’ing people, assigning to-dos, pinning content to the top of the workspace and more. Added comments and descriptions perform a conversation-type function that doesn’t require Slack or Zoom.
This new Dropbox app is available for early access if you’re so inclined, otherwise, you’ll have to wait until they roll it out to everybody.
