News Corp chooses Dropbox for enterprise-wide collaboration

News Corp is home to many storied brands including The Wall Street Journal, HarperCollins Publishers, and digital real estate service realtor.com, to name just a few.

What do all these businesses have in common—besides each being industry leaders? They’re all highly collaborative.

For example, reporters must interact with sources, editors, photographers, and copy editors all before an article is published.

To make it easier for its 25,000-plus employees globally to work together, News Corp decided to roll out Dropbox across the organization. “It allows people to collaborate around all file types within the organization and with external partners,” says Global Chief Information Officer Dominic Shine. “And they can do so from anywhere, in a way that they can quickly and easily adapt to.”

Moving file sharing to the cloud is part of a broader digital transformation at News Corp to provide employees with best-of-breed tools that boost both teamwork and productivity. The switch to Dropbox Business first began with a pilot of the collaboration platform among 250 employees in New York headquarters in 2014.

When shopping for new technologies, News Corp is exceptionally thorough. It looks for solutions that are easy to use, and don’t require significant ongoing investments in infrastructure. “We need tools that are agile and flexible enough to adapt to our changing needs, and are scalable enough to use across the global enterprise,” says Shine.

Shine says Dropbox checked all the boxes, including having the right enterprise security features and administrative controls to keep company information safe. But the platform had another advantage over other services that influenced the decision to go wall to wall: “What we found was that people were naturally gravitating towards Dropbox, which was a tool they were already using in their personal lives,” he says.

Today, Dropbox is smoothing collaboration across News Corp, including in its news businesses. It’s making it easier for newsrooms to gather and edit the rich multimedia content that subscribers love. Reporters and contributors in the field can now upload much larger video files—and make those uploads happen much faster. “It helps us make sure that the end product we’re delivering is the best quality it can be,” says Shine.

News Corp has big plans for Dropbox beyond making it the place where every employee stores and shares documents. Shine says the platform’s flexible API means it could integrate with other platforms used in departments like sales, legal, and HR. The company already relies on cloud solutions like Workday for HR, and Salesforce for customer relationship management.

“Dropbox has the potential to be the glue in our ecosystem, connecting a number of those key business processes for us,” he says.