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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday January 31 2017, @12:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the taking-on-the-800lb-gorillas dept.

Dropbox's latest tool for businesses, a piece of collaborative editing software called Paper, is launching globally today. Paper has been in the works at Dropbox for quite some time, having first been announced in October of 2015 before entering a public beta phase in August of last year. Dropbox's software is similar to Google's suite of workplace cloud apps. Paper — itself a minimal document editor and writing tool like Google Docs — is the focal point, while all of Dropbox's other services and features now plug into and augment the experience.

Paper is Dropbox's latest attempt to court businesses away from Microsoft and Google, or at the very least to encourage companies to pay for Dropbox services on top of what they already use institutionally. It's part of Dropbox's ongoing shift away from consumer storage and apps and toward enterprise software that is both more lucrative and self-sustaining. The company shut down its Mailbox email app and Carousel photo storage service back in 2015. In place of its consumer focus, Dropbox has been pouring more resources into Paper and other projects that make its mobile apps and website a place to perform work, instead of a barebones destination for files.

The biggest question now is whether Paper is the transformative product Dropbox wants it to be. Because many organizations do already pay for Office 365 or Google's G Suite, Dropbox knows that it must play nice with competitors' products or risk alienating workers who either enjoy using Microsoft Word or Google Sheets or do so out of necessity. To that end, Dropbox Paper isn't focused solely on creation. It will let you import, edit, and collaborate on a number of other file types from Google, Microsoft, and others.

http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/30/14435582/dropbox-paper-business-app-launch-date-ios-android-web


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @02:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @02:27PM (#461208)

    At one point Dropbox was very honest that their services were not HIPAA compliant. Unless that's changed, not interested.
    (BTW, HIPAA in relation to document security is virtually NOTHING. Must be encrypted in transit. Must be encrypted at rest. Must be willing to accept responsibility for those two factors. So anything that won't come right out and say, "Here's how our product fully complies with HIPAA".... well, why would you trust that with any information?)
    Cisco Sharefile may not be much better as a drop-and-retrieve service (actually I think it is, but for the sake of argument...) but it is HIPAA compliant. Then again, you'll pay through the nose for it. But one does tend to get what one pays for. How much does Dropbox (just the base service) cost again? Thought so - it's probably worth that much.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @04:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 31 2017, @04:41PM (#461284)

    So anything that won't come right out and say, "Here's how our product fully complies with HIPAA".... well, why would you trust that with any information?

    Because you know how to encrypt the information yourself?