At its recent inaugural Work in Progress user conference, Dropbox revealed its vision for the smart workspace—a digital environment that brings all of a team’s content together.
The smart workspace comes to life with today’s the launch of Dropbox Spaces, the evolution of the shared folder into a collaborative workspace. Dropbox Spaces is now part of the new Dropbox, announced earlier this year, and also includes new features developed through the company’s machine intelligence platform, DBXi. In addition, the company added several new collaboration features across Dropbox surfaces including desktop, mobile, and web apps.
“We’re building the smart workspace because we need technology that helps us quiet the noise, rather than contributing to it,” said Drew Houston, CEO, Dropbox. “This starts with the launch of Dropbox Spaces, which brings together your most important content and tools into one organized place, so you can stay focused and in sync with your team.”
“It’s increasingly evident that modern knowledge workers are bombarded with needlessly distracting notifications that stop them from getting work done,” said analyst Chris Marsh, Research Director, Workforce Productivity and Compliance, 451 Research. “451 Research’s survey data shows that only a third of employees are very satisfied with their work applications. The sheer volume of apps they need to use is the biggest overall pain point. Dropbox’s new smart workspace will help address this issue by combining cloud content, platform services, machine intelligence and a collaborative user experience in one central location.”
The company also announced that its new desktop app—previously available in early access—is now generally available and rolling out starting today. The desktop app also includes Dropbox Spaces and several new features such as image search that uses machine intelligence to let users find image files including jpg, jpeg, png and gif, by searching for the contents of the images. it also features file previews that allow users to see files such as AutoCAD in high fidelity using Dropbox on the desktop, even without source applications installed.
Another feature is paper integration in the Dropbox file system, which makes it possible to create, store, and access Paper docs from Dropbox. The release is available to new Paper users starting today, and will be available to existing users soon.
