The Paper tool is a simplistic text editor a la Google Docs, while it’s also possible to drag in photos, resize them, align them and fit them around text. “Someone else may be writing code, another in Google Docs – teams have really wanted a single surface to bring all of those ideas into a single place”. At the moment, Paper isn’t actually available and you can only access it by being a current Dropbox user and signing up for the wait list. From there, you can turn your text into a headline, a list, or a to-do.
Advertisement
Dropbox has just entered the competitive space of collaborative online tools, and it hopes to overcome its late start with a simple, intuitive document collaboration tool called Paper. We’ve spent the past few hours making documents, adding comments, and trolling each other with animated stickers, and have some early thoughts to share.
Paper is a web-only app that you can connect to via your Dropbox account, with a mobile version on the way (after the beta). Beyond text, any file you store in your Dropbox can quickly be added to Paper – if you grab the sharing URL of the file and paste it into Paper, the program automatically formats a preview for you. You’ll still need an invite, but the company gave us a preview of what’s probably the biggest addition to Dropbox in years. But Dropbox Paper – at least from the outside – doesn’t seem to do a whole lot that would sufficiently differentiate it from the competition.
The idea is to let users share nearly anything, no matter what tools you’re using.
Pan says that Dropbox’s primary focus, as of now, is to get Paper from “thousands of users to thousands of businesses and teams”.
It’s hard to say how Dropbox will shift people over from Docs and Office, but at the very least Dropbox is offering a novel solution; rather than having a ton of different documents all for different projects, Paper lets you organize them all into one collaborative narrative. The new service will keeps things from getting messy and yet it is rich enough to support proper messaging as well as creation and collaboration. But it’s real power seems to shine through with collaboration, where Dropbox is looking to take the lead over established players like Google Docs and Microsoft Office. The last differentiator is organization and helping teams find their work quicker. ‘The other half is how information is organized and retrieved across an entire company’.
Advertisement
Dropbox’s enterprise product is seeing a few traction, but the company seems like it’s falling behind as its competitors develop better file syncing for their products.
