The newest iteration of Dropbox Spaces, along with new workflow and security features, will look to usher in improved communication capabilities, and streamline workloads for businesses.
Coming on the heels of the company’s recent Virtual First announcement, which will see Dropbox employees working remotely by default, the release demonstrates a holistic approach to aiding the collaboration of distributed teams.
“Since our founding, our customers have turned to Dropbox to get organised and work from anywhere,” said Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox.
“We’ve gone through a one-way door — the dramatic shift we’ve all experienced to distributed work will continue far beyond when the pandemic ends.
“While the shift to distributed work creates a lot of flexibility and opportunity, it also introduces new challenges and pain points that Dropbox is uniquely positioned to solve.
“By adopting a Virtual First approach ourselves, we’ll be able to design better products for this new environment. Our latest launch is an example of this.”
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Wayne Kurtzman, research director, social and collaboration at IDC, commented: “These features make it easier for people to work as a distributed team, and support better governance and compliance.
“These features are designed to streamline communications and teamwork, and ensure their teams remain connected and productive from wherever they work.”
New features for Dropbox Spaces 2.0
Dropbox Spaces will now be a standalone product, built on a single surface, dedicated to enabling start-to-finish collaboration with internal and external colleagues and vendors.
New features that have been launched include:
- Project spaces: Users can create a space to host content, tasks and progress for a particular project, which internal and external collaborators can access.
- Progress tracking: Project components can be tracked and prioritised, with users being able to create and assign new tasks, as well as publishing comments on existing ones.
- Meeting capabilities: Meetings can be joined and followed up on from Spaces, and attendees, agendas and action items can be accessed from a customisable template.
- File sharing: Users are able to add files, including traditional formats and cloud content such as Google Docs, to project hubs, and quickly find existing information.
Dropbox Spaces 2.0 is currently in private beta.
Extended availability
In addition to the release of Dropbox 2.0, several features will now be available to Dropbox Business users, including:
- Over 30 new apps in the Dropbox App Centre, aiding access to more than 70 tools from Dropbox partners (now available in beta for select Business Standard and Advanced users);
- The ability for businesses and individuals to share customisable branding (now available to Business Advanced and above);
- Traffic and insights, to help users track engagement when sharing assets (now available to Business Advanced and above);
- Dropbox Passwords Beta, which allows team members to store passwords in one secure place, sync across devices, and access from anywhere (now available to Dropbox Business teams on certain Dropbox Business plans with early access to the feature).
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Security features
Dropbox has also announced the release of new security features, which include:
- Alerts and notifications for real-time detections of suspicious behavior, risky activity, and potential data leaks;
- Data classification, allowing admins to label personal and sensitive data;
- External sharing reports, which allow for documentation of details on who is sharing data, when they are sharing it, and what types of files are shared;
- Data retention, added to data governance features to help users prevent accidental deletion of content that is required by regulations to be held by a certain period of time (now available to all Dropbox Business teams as an additional purchase).
