Dropbox has announced the arrival of a new plan called Professional, a solution the company explains was designed specifically for independent workers. With Dropbox Professional, users are given access to both Dropbox Showcase and Dropbox Smart Sync, ultimately enjoying a single destination where they can store their content, track it, and share it with other people.
Dropbox's online collaborative environment, Paper, has received some updates that improve the usage experience. Chief among the changes is new integrations with Figma and InVision, and that itself is joined by the new ability to preview Sketch files within Paper, no longer requiring users to toggle out of the service. The new features are rolling out to Dropbox Paper users today.
Computing devices are getting more powerful, more varied, and more ubiquitous, but the data storage in these devices hasn't changed that much. We are still beholden to the HDDs, SSDs, and eMMCs or UFS of yesteryears. In fact, the storage story has become even more complicated because each device has its own storage that you have to manage or keep in sync with other devices.
Enter cloud computing and cloud storage, with its promise of being able to access your data anytime, anywhere. Well, as long as you have an Internet connection, that is. It is an inescapable fact of modern day computing life and it pays to know the choices you have. Here are ten of the top cloud storage options this half of the year.
Dropbox has finally brought its document scanner feature to its Android app, enabling users to scan documents directly into their Dropbox account. This feature arrived first for iOS users, and works by saving scanned documents as PDF files. The scans can be adjusted directly on mobile when necessary, including cropping and rotating the images.
Dropbox has introduced a new online interface that makes its service both easier and faster to use, according to the company. Those who access their cloud-stored data via the Dropbox.com domain will find a cleaner, neater design that makes files and Paper easier to access, as well as prominently placed actions like viewing a document's version history or adding a comment to something. The new interface began rolling out yesterday.
Dropbox is pushing its collaborative tools, graduating Dropbox Paper to a full product as it tries to avoid being dismissed as just another cloud storage service. First launched in October 2015, Paper is effectively a hosted workspace within which teams can manage a project from various locations and with multiple shared documents. After several months as a closed-beta, it opened up to all midway through last year.
Despite the ubiquity of mobile devices, Internet coverage isn’t so. In addition to not having a cellular data plan, or public transportation with no Wi-Fi access there are also places where radio waves just can’t reach, like tunnels. In these cases, cloud storage is rendered helpless and offline access becomes a matter of life or death (for your work). Dropbox, one of the biggest names in that space, has long taken heed of that by allowing individual files to be taken offline. Now it is taking one step further by making whole folders available offline as well.
When Apple formally started rolling out iOS 10 to users, dozens of apps rode the wave to take advantage of the hype and craze. Dropbox, however, bid its time and for good measure. Now it is unleashing a flood of new features taking advantage of the latest iOS version, from being able to share files directly from inside iMessage to, amusingly, being able to watch a video stored on Dropbox while you try to be productive at work.
There has been troubling rise of hacking incidents in the past two years or so, so when Dropbox, perhaps the most used cloud storage service in the world, starts sending prompts for users to change their passwords, there is naturally no small amount of worry spreading around. Dropbox does reassure its users that there has been no known intrusion or compromise. They’re just taking a precautionary measure considering how old most of the passwords were. And it might be a good idea to change yours today, too.
Dropbox is throwing open the doors to Paper, its collaborative document and planning tool for teams, allowing anybody to sign up and try. Falling somewhere in-between Slack, Quip, and Google Docs, Dropbox Paper supports multiple people editing the same document simultaneously, along with group to-do lists, media embeds, and more.
Dropbox wants to make things easier for business users, and so it is rolling out new "AdminX" tools. These tools aim to make things easier for administrators controlling the Dropbox accounts, including providing a central place for them to control which users have access to specific files and folders. The overall admin experience has been ‘reimagined,’ as well, so that it is more intuitive than in the past. Dropbox says it has made the changes in part based on feedback about what account admins want.
Dropbox has been updated with new productivity tools, including the ability to scan documents with the mobile app and have them saved directly within Dropbox. The company teases that this is just the first step in a larger rollout of improved productivity features, and it’s a good way to kick things off. Joining document scanning is improved photo management, the ability to view version histories of items, more robust file sharing, and more.
