New Dropbox features keep your distributed team organized and secure

When the pandemic suddenly shuttered offices and sent workers home, teams became scattered. At the same time that workers were isolated from each other, so were their tools. Overnight, teams had to learn new ways to stay connected and productive. 

This dramatic shift forever changed the way we work. But it also opened up an opportunity to radically improve our workflows. This year, our experience as a fully distributed team has inspired us to take a leap into the future of work as a Virtual First company. Remote work is now our everyday default mode—and we’ll be applying what we learn to develop products that eliminate the obstacles facing distributed teams. 

A new study by The Economist Intelligence Unit shows the impact of those obstacles. 68% of workers find it harder to launch new collaborative projects. More than half are encountering more miscommunication. And with apps scattered across multiple platforms and devices, they’re dealing with even more distractions from nearly nonstop notifications. 

As a result, 28% of time in knowledge work is lost to distraction every year—leaving employees only 72% of time for productive work. This equals 581 hours lost per person annually, totaling $391 billion for US companies in lost productivity.

Dropbox Business wants to help solve those problems. Today, we’re introducing simple, secure solutions so your team can organize projects, stay in sync, connect all your tools, and keep your company’s data secure.

Collaborate on projects in one organized place

The new Dropbox Spaces is a virtual workspace that brings teams and projects together. With Spaces, teams have one easy-to-use place where they can collaborate on content, communicate with their team, and coordinate projects from start to finish.

• Streamline your work. When information is spread across tools and channels, projects are harder to kick off and manage. Spaces makes it easier by bringing together files, cloud content, tasks, comments, and timelines into a single Space for teams.
• Prioritize your day. Competing priorities make it difficult to work efficiently and finish what needs to get done. With Spaces, you can create tasks for yourself and the team, add project milestones, and manage your schedule so you never miss a deadline. 
• Stay connected to move projects forward. Connecting with people and keeping tabs on work-in-progress is more challenging than ever. With Spaces, you can share project updates, reply to feedback, and feel the human connection of working together from anywhere.

The new Dropbox Spaces is currently available in private beta. To request access, check out dropbox.com/beta_spaces.

Keep work moving no matter where you are

Stay in sync with your team and focused on customers. These features were designed to keep you connected, so schedules, feedback, and workflow can stay on track.  

• HelloSign has reimagined its Prep and Send experience and now guides users step-by-step through the process of uploading, preparing, and sending a document out for signature. This makes it even easier for distributed teams to keep work moving with eSignatures on their most critical business agreements.
• Branded sharing: New enhancements make it even easier for businesses to establish their brands, and for admins to enable end users to customize their branding. (Now available to Dropbox Business Advanced and above)

• Traffic and insights: Track engagement when sharing files (Now available to Dropbox Business Advanced and above)
• Computer backup: Allows teams to automatically back up their local Desktop, Documents, and Downloads folders to Dropbox, securely access them on the go, and easily retrieve them even if their hardware fails or is lost (Now available to all Dropbox Business teams)
• Dropbox Passwords Beta lets your team seamlessly log in to websites and apps by storing passwords and syncing them across devices. Since Passwords secures credentials with zero-knowledge encryption, you have peace of mind knowing that your team’s account details are protected (Now available in beta to Dropbox Business teams on certain Dropbox Business plans with early access to the feature)

• Creative Tools Add-on: Designed specifically for media professionals across industries, additional features are now available to remove the roadblocks in your collaborative process (Available to all Dropbox Business teams as an additional purchase)
• App Center: With 30+ new apps added, teams can discover and connect to best-of-breed tools from Dropbox partners (Now available in beta to all individual users and select Dropbox Business Standard and Dropbox Advanced teams)
• Follow: Stay informed about activity on your most important shared folders (Now available to all Dropbox users)

Stay protected everywhere with HQ-level security at home

Bring content and users from across the company together in a safe, secure, central place where you can count on a reliable, enterprise-level platform to protect it all. 

• Alerts and notifications provides you with real-time detections of suspicious behavior, risky activity, and potential data leaks (Available in beta in Dropbox Enterprise)
• Data classification gives you the ability to label personal and sensitive data to easily identify and prevent sensitive information from being exposed (Available in beta to Dropbox Enterprise teams)
• External sharing reports provide you with insight into how data is shared outside of the company—including who is sharing, when they are sharing it, and what types of files are shared (Available in beta to Dropbox Enterprise and Business Advanced teams)
• Data Governance Add-on now lets you set data retention policies to help adhere with compliance and regulation requirements (Available to all Dropbox Business teams as an additional purchase)

To learn more about Dropbox Enterprise security beta, visit experience.dropbox.com/enterprise-security.

To learn more about the new features designed to keep your distributed team organized and secure, check out our videos on virtual first tools and remote work security capabilities.

Note: Dropbox Showcase will be shut down on January 31, 2021. From observing usage of Showcase, we found that it was primarily used for final delivery with analytics. So we’ve made the decision to focus on building dedicated tools—such as branded sharing, traffic and insights, and Dropbox Transfer—to address those needs. To learn more, visit our help center.