Dropbox’s Mobile Apps Are Now Integrated With Microsoft Office

Earlier this month, Dropbox and Microsoft announced a partnership that would see Dropbox offer better support for Microsoft’s Office Suite, including the ability to edit Office docs from the Dropbox mobile app among other things. Today, those integrations have gone live for users of both the Android phone and iOS Dropbox applications.

Explains Dropbox in a blog post announcing the news, users can now edit their Office files when they’re “on the go,” editing them directly from the Dropbox app and accessing the files directly from the Office apps. To use the new feature, you’ll first need update your app to the latest version, then open any Office document, spreadsheet or presentation that’s stored in your Dropbox.

From here, a new “Edit” icon (see above picture) will be available that will allow you to switch over to the new mobile Office apps to make changes to the file. When you’re finished working, those changes will be saved back to Dropbox automatically.

The Dropbox/Microsoft partnership is an extensive deal aimed at increasing collaboration between the two firms, and may have surprised some given that the two companies offer competing products. Microsoft has a Dropbox-like service called OneDrive, but Dropbox’s larger service reaches hundreds of millions of users, including 80,000 businesses.

The agreement announced at the beginning of November included four parts, as reported: the ability to quickly edit docs from Dropbox on mobile, accessing Dropbox docs from Office apps, sharing Dropbox links of Office apps, and the creation of first-party Dropbox apps for Microsoft’s mobile offerings.

Source:Techcrunch

Dropbox Sees Growth From 200 Million to 300Million Users in 6 Months

File sharing and cloud storage service Dropbox has announced that it has crossed the 300 million user mark. The announcement comes just six months after Dropbox had crossed the 200 million user mark in November. The 100 million user increase is also being attributed to Dropbox now focusing on rolling out more services, and improving its offerings for business users.

It is interesting to document the quick growth rate for Dropbox. Consider this, back in November 2012 Dropbox had a total of 100 million users. It took them one year to reach the 200 million user mark last year. Compared to that it has taken only six months to cross the 300 million user mark now. 

The official Dropbox blog just has a picture of door with the 100, 200, 300 million marks etched on the left side of the door frame. The blogpost is titled 'Thanks for helping us grow', with the caption 'New notch on the wall'.

For its phenomenal rise Dropbox seems mostly to have its Dropbox for Business service to thank. The shift towards a more business-focused approach has helped change the way it operates. It is to be noted that according to Forbes only around one percent of the users were paying for Dropbox's service whilst a majority of users were using it's free two gigabyte storage plan. 

Dropbox for Business has allowed users to maintain both personal and corporate accounts. In addition, Dropbox recently even acquired several new companies, such as the 3D photo app Bubbli, workplace chat solutions provider Zulip, as well as personal photo-stream app Loom and collaborative document tool Hackpad .

Apart from tweaking its Android and iOS apps, the company recently also announced the Carousel app - a cross- device photo gallery for users who use Dropbox for transferring images.