As you’ve heard, today we’re beginning to expand the beta for Dropbox Paper, our real-time collaboration tool built for teams. If you already have a Dropbox account and have been invited to use Paper, all you have to do is sign in and voila, you will have an array of features to use at your disposal. The major difference between the two is that the IA writer has been designed for solo use while the new Dropbox service is meant for collaborative work. Each is designated by a colored cursor, and the user’s full name is displayed in the margins, crediting their contributions to the file. There’s just one font and three font sizes to choose from, for instance, and formatting is very limited. Given the inevitable competition between these services, it wouldn’t be hard to believe Dropbox revealed Paper to try and steal a few attention away from its new rival. You can use it to communicate with people and share interesting stuff with them, or you can use it to aid team work and create basic documents. And that clutter extends to the tools being used.
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Not surprisingly, users can add collaborators to the document who can all work together simultaneously. It’s the first time Dropbox has really integrated with Docs and Drive. Paper will automatically change these links into images and videos. Just like Gmail, items you delete aren’t really deleted until you really, really want to delete them entirely. According to Wired, “Paper is expanding today from a few thousand people to a few thousand teams, but won’t be widely available for a while”.
By default, no formatting tools are evident – as on Medium, to bring them up, you first have to highlight text. For extra drama, you can blow an image up to a full-bleed, widescreen photo that takes up the entire browser window.
Any file that’s stored in Dropbox – so, a Word, PowerPoint or Excel document – can be dumped into the Paper document and served up as a preview.
A handy “following” feed shows a chronological activity on files you own and files that have been shared with you. This is because Dropbox has been around with a cloud storage option for years and quite a bit longer than most options out there.
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You can bold, italicize, underline, strikethrough, block quote, and that’s about it. Dropbox wants you to use Paper for collaborating and sharing rather than creating fancy documents. Another advantage Pan pointed out is that Paper will help teams work comparatively quicker. ‘Creation and collaboration are only half the problem, ‘ he said. And several other companies.
