The company hadn’t revealed much about the service then but today, the tool has been officially christened as Dropbox Paper and more and more devs are getting their hands on the beta of the app. This move from Dropbox puts it into the arena with the likes of Google, long term partner Microsoft and a handful of others.
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You probably know Dropbox for one thing, and one thing only: storing shit.
Though the interface and most features are quite simple and basic, Paper will surely not disappoint you in any way.
For now, Paper is a web application that can be accessed through Dropbox account, however the company says it will roll out a mobile app once the product is out of beta. With Paper, Dropbox will also let you respond using stickers.
Hey, I understand. Don’t knock it until you try it. But describing the challenge ahead of Dropbox as “herculean” might even be an understatement. The only other formatting you can perform now is basic bold, italics, underline and strikethrough and block quotes.
With Paper, users can add to-do lists along with check-boxes, and also ‘@’ in case you want to assign the task to someone. Just drop the link into a Paper document and it will create a full video player for you – same thing with Spotify or Soundcloud links. Besides, it generates previews of URLs to let you view an Excel sheet or a few PowerPoint slides directly from their URLs.
Paper is now in beta and what it does is it acts as a collaborative tool where users can write up documents and share them with other users. You can insert documents like photos or videos, and you can download documents. Of course, users will also be able to create their own private documents and everything is rolled into an easy to search directory. “Creation and collaboration are only half the problem”, he said.
Nonetheless, with Paper’s release and its established file-hosting and file-sharing offerings, Dropbox is shaping itself up to rival Google for Work and Evernote, which are both platforms that offer collaborative features beyond word processing. And several other companies.
The timing of the announcement coincidentally falls on the same day as Quip’s big million round of funding.
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As we reported earlier this year, Dropbox has previously struggled to capture enough paying business customers to justify the $10 billion valuation it got in its last round, and a couple of mutual funds marked down the value of their Dropbox holdings earlier this month, as The Information reported.
