Dropbox has been one of the more effective cloud computing tools, and has gained a considerable following amongst personal users wishing to store files somewhere in the cloud. With over 100 million users, it's an incredibly popular service.
What they've largely failed to achieve however is any kind of corporate following, despite the company themselves claiming to be in use in 95% of Fortune 500 companies. The company are making a concerted effort to change all that with some new updates however.
Their enterprise offering revolves around Dropbox for Teams. The service offers unlimited storage for teams using it for business use. Whilst nice, it lacks some key administrative controls that hamper its usefulness, not to mention offering little in the way of social interaction.
They have attempted to improve the product in two key areas:
- More visibility of what users are doing
- More control over sharing features
The changes now offer administrators a couple of new tools to help address these issues.
For instance, they can now see detailed activity for either individual users or indeed specific groups. In a nice security feature, admins can block particular devices from accessing the Dropbox account, say if a member lost their phone for instance.
Admins can also control sharing permissions across either individuals or teams. So for instance, they can now determine whether users can share folders or links outside of the group.
The changes are indeed welcome, but I'm still far from convinced that it will mean Dropbox can start competing for enterprise contracts against more enterprise-focused competitors like Box, Egnyte, and Huddle.
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