Dropbox for Business gets new sharing, search features

While Dropbox‘s consumer offering is popular, its Dropbox for Business service, launched April 2013, hasn’t gained as much traction as the company would like. But thanks to new features announced today, Dropbox hopes to change that.

With an estimated 4 million businesses using Dropbox to store and share documents, it comes as a bit of a surprise that just 80,000 have signed up for Dropbox for Business. Dropbox hopes that new sharing options and search features will make the premium service tier more appealing.

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One of the biggest draws of the new Business is full-text search. It will allow people to search at a deeper level into Dropbox folders and files than ever before. Currently, you can only search by file name.

Beefed up security, specifically as it relates to document sharing, ought to have a lot of appeal, too. View-only permissions on shared folders mean only those with the appropriate permissions are allowed to edit specific shared files. Password protection and links with expiration dates round out the security features. Just last month, VentureBeat talked about why both Dropbox and Box needed to change course and ramp up security in order to capture the coveted enterprise market. So this looks like a step in the right direction.

Other features include extending Project Harmony, which allows people to edit Microsoft Office documents in Dropbox, to Android. API tweaks are also included. The latest changes will let third-party apps integrate documents from Dropbox in a more intuitive way, either through Shared Folders or Document Previews.

The sudden feature boost might have something to do with rumors floating about that Dropbox is an IPO candidate. And though the company is currently valued at $10 billion, the more revenue it can generate via paid subscriptions — Dropbox for Business costs $15 per user/month with a minimum of 5 users — the better.

Via: TechCrunch