These days, modern companies and truly productive teams often span offices, regions, and operating systems. Sadly, the tools that many rely on to access their data—traditional ones like corporate file servers (shared network drives) and newer, browser-based solutions—aren’t suited to the way modern teams work. Today, at
Dropbox Open London, we showcased a new technology preview that will tackle this problem head on: Project Infinite. Its goal? To reimagine how people find, access, and collaborate with large amounts of data. With Project Infinite, we’re addressing a major issue our users have asked us to solve. The amount of information being created and shared has exploded, but most people still work on devices with limited storage capacity. While teams can store terabyte upon terabyte in the cloud, most individuals' laptops can only store a small fraction of that. Getting secure access to all the team's data usually means jumping over to a web browser, a clunky user experience at best. Project Infinite will enable users to seamlessly and securely access all their Dropbox files from the desktop, regardless of how much space they have available on their hard drives. Everything in the company’s Dropbox that you’re given access to, whether it's stored locally or in the cloud, will show up in Dropbox on your desktop. If it's synced locally, you'll see the familiar green checkmark, while everything else will have a new cloud icon. https://youtu.be/iT4rAaV9MhU Through Project Infinite, teams will gain:
- Visibility in context. Every file you've been given access to—even ones that aren't stored locally—will appear in Windows File Explorer and Mac OS X Finder. You can quickly drill down through folders to find what you need, without the lag of a network drive or the inconvenience of a web app. Plus, you can view key info like file size, and creation and modification dates through your desktop file system, no downloading required.
- Real-time access. Files and folders stored in the cloud can be organized with familiar drag-and-drop simplicity, right from the desktop. And when you need to open something from the cloud, just double-click it like any other file. Dropbox will automatically sync and open the file for you.
- Universal compatibility. For IT teams, Project Infinite works the way your teams work, supporting cross-platform access and backwards-compatibility on any computer running Windows 7 or higher, or Mac OS X 10.9 and up. IT teams can bring the power of Project Infinite to the systems they manage and you can share and collaborate with ease.
With Project Infinite, the recently introduced
Magic Pocket, and more product announcements to come throughout the year, we’re continuing to increase our pace of innovation. Already deployed with a select number of sponsor customers, Project Infinite will change the way teams store and access data. Check back here for more info as we continue to make progress.
