Coming soon to a Dropbox for Business near you: Single sign-on (SSO)

A couple months ago, we introduced a new admin console that gives administrators greater visibility and control over how their organization uses Dropbox. Well, the engine(er)s have been churning since then, and now we’re stoked to announce one of the features most requested by our customers, particularly larger businesses: single sign-on, or SSO.

SSO in a nutshell

SSO works behind the scenes to let users sign in just once to a central identity provider, like Active Directory, and securely access all their business apps, like Dropbox. With SSO, companies can put their existing trusted identity provider in charge of the authentication process. For users, SSO means ease — one fewer password to remember and one fewer step to get to your work. Once logged in to your system, there’s no need to sign in to Dropbox separately. For IT admins, SSO means additional security and administrative management. Single sign-on gives you complete ownership of the authentication process and works with your company’s existing password policies. It also easily ties into the existing Dropbox provisioning and de-provisioning API to provide further Active Directory integration.

Single sign-on? Sign me up!

We're excited to be working with a great set of identity provider partners — including Ping Identity, Okta, OneLogin, Centrify, and Symplified — to bring SSO to our customers next month. And since we’re using the industry-standard Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), this implementation of single sign-on integrates easily with any large identity provider your company may use that also supports SAML. Or, if you’ve gone ahead and built your own SAML-based federated authentication process, it will work with Dropbox too.

Say hello to Dropbox for Business

With all the changes we’re making to create a Dropbox that’s better for companies both large and small, it’s become clear that the name ‘Dropbox for Teams’ doesn’t quite fit anymore. To better rep the features we’re building and the awesome companies that use Dropbox to create, share, and save their most important work, we realize the time has come to rename to Dropbox for Business. But some things will never change — we still think a good picture can say it better than we ever could: