Dropbox, Inc. unveiled the next iteration of its collaborative workspace—Dropbox Spaces—in addition to several new features that help teams get organized, collaborate, and keep work moving securely from anywhere. The news comes on the heels of the company’s recent Virtual First announcement, and demonstrates a holistic approach to leading the remote work revolution as more businesses embrace this long-term shift.
The sudden move to distributed work has introduced a unique set of challenges for teams. In a recent Economist Intelligence Unit study, remote workers reported increased working hours and volume of work, risk of miscommunication, and difficulty working with multiple collaborators. Dropbox aims to address these challenges and more with Dropbox Spaces 2.0, several new workflow features, and new enterprise security features and certifications.
“Since our founding, our customers have turned to Dropbox to get organised and work from anywhere,” said Dropbox co-founder and chief executive officer Drew Houston. “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.”
“Becoming a Virtual First company gives us the opportunity to design software that specifically meets our customers needs when it comes to distributed work — we are now a distributed team building for other distributed teams. This empathy has informed our latest release of Dropbox Spaces – the features help to improve the remote experience of project management, team collaboration and security control,” said James Ang, Head of Partnerships, Dropbox APAC.
“These features make it easier for people to work as a distributed team, and support better governance and compliance,” said Wayne Kurtzman, Research Director, Social and Collaboration, IDC. “These features are designed to streamline communications and teamwork, and ensure their teams remain connected and productive from wherever they work.”
Improve team collaboration with Dropbox Spaces 2.0
Dropbox unveiled the next version of Dropbox Spaces: the virtual workspace that brings teams and projects together. Building toward the vision laid out for Dropbox Spaces last year, the product has evolved to help teams streamline their work, prioritize their day, and stay connected to move work forward. Initially introduced as an evolution of the shared folder, Spaces is now a standalone product that enables teams to collaborate with internal and external collaborators on projects—from kickoff to delivery. Spaces brings the best-loved collaboration features from across Dropbox into a single surface to help teams manage projects together. These include:
- Project Spaces: Create a project Space to bring the internal team, external clients, content, timeline, and project tasks all into one organized place. It provides an intuitive surface for the project, so teams can contribute and collaborate together as they move the project forward.
- Tasks: Prioritize what needs to be done and keep projects on track. Create, manage, assign, and comment on tasks across multiple projects. Attach project files to relevant tasks and manage personal to-do lists.
- Content: Quickly find, add, and manage relevant project information. Users can easily add files (including traditional file types and cloud content, like Google Docs) directly to Spaces, and search for files across projects.
- Meetings: Easily join, organize, and follow up on meetings from Spaces. Centralize important information like agendas, action items, and attendees in customizable meeting templates and embed meeting docs directly in a project Space. Automatically sync meeting docs to calendar invites so everyone stays on the same page.
- Updates: Stay up to date with a shared team view of work in progress and project updates. Attach files to posts in the updates feed, respond to comments with text, an emoji, or link to a file.
Dropbox Spaces 2.0 is currently in private beta. Click here to request access.
Keep work moving no matter where users are
Dropbox is extending availability of several features to Dropbox Business users to help teams keep work moving. These include:
- App Center: 30+ new appsadded to the Dropbox App Center to help teams discover and connect to more than 70 best-of-breed tools from Dropbox partners (now available in beta for select Business Standard and Advanced users)
- Branded sharing: New enhancements make it even easier for businesses to establish their brands, and for admins to enable team individuals to customize their branding (now available to Business Advanced and above)
- Traffic and insights: Helps users track engagement when sharing assets (now available to Business Advanced and above)
- Follow: Helps users stay informed about activity on their most important shared folders (now available to all users)
- Computer backup: Allows teams toautomatically back up their local Desktop, Documents, and Downloads folders to Dropbox, securely access them on the go, and easily retrieve the content even if their hardware fails or is lost (now available to all Business plans)
- Dropbox Passwords Beta: 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)
Starting today, all HelloSign users will also have access to a reimagined experience that guides them step-by-step through the process of uploading, preparing, and sending a document out for signature. This improvement makes it even easier for distributed teams to keep their most critical business agreements moving with eSignatures.
Maintain HQ-level security from home
Dropbox also announced several new security features to help businesses maintain employee privacy and security while managing complex distributed teams. These include:
- Alerts and notifications provide admins with real-time detections of suspicious behavior, risky activity, and potential data leaks
- Data classification gives admins the ability to label personal and sensitive data in order to take better precautions around protecting personal information
- External sharing reports provide admins with insight into how data is shared outside of the company—including who is sharing, when they are sharing it, and what types of files are shared
- Data retention has been added to Dropbox data governance features to enable users to 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)
Interested admins can sign up for these security features in beta now.
In addition, Dropbox announced compliance with several new privacy and security standards including ISO 27701 Certification, Cloud Security Alliance GDPR Code of Conduct, NIST 800-171 Compliance, and support for FDA 21 CFR Part 11 Compliance. These new certifications ensure Dropbox meets the most stringent enterprise security standards.
As businesses around the world adapt to a distributed environment, Dropbox is at the forefront of developing the technology to support them. Dropbox provides a single organized place for teams’ content and all the collaboration around it. More details on Dropbox Spaces can be found here, and other new features for distributed teams here.
