Dropbox has announced a new package for colleges and universities, which will help students as well as faculty members to collaborate files efficiently and conveniently.
Dropbox is among the most popular cloud storage service providers in the market. Users can get up to 2 GB of free storage and increase it by completing tasks or introducing friends. Dropbox also offers Business and Pro plans, but until now, it did not provide customized services for educational institutions.
The company has announced Dropbox for Education, which is similar to the services provided to businesses, but there are some differences. The Dropbox Education package will cost $49 per year for a user and with a minimum of 300 users. Individual users will get 15 GB cloud storage space, which accounts to 4.5 TB in total.
Dropbox Education will offer better control and visibility to an educational establishment's IT team, who will have access to tools for monitoring, managing and permission sharing purposes.
Dropbox users get advanced security with the service, which is designed with multiple layers of protection for enhanced safety of all users.
Dropbox Education will allow users to have access to files anytime and from anywhere in the campus. Dropbox works on any devices, online as well as offline. With the company's cross-device sync, students, staff and lecturers can easily access files regardless of their size.
"With 500 million users on Dropbox, it's easy to share documents and collaborate with anyone — teachers, students and external partners — even if they don't have a Dropbox account," says Dropbox. "Our extensive app ecosystem includes higher education tools like Blackboard, Turnitin and Moodle — so faculty and students can work together with the programs they're already using."
Dropbox Business has a monthly price plan of $12.50 per use with a minimum of five users. However, these users have access to unlimited storage capacity. The Education package costs less, but it also offers limited storage capacity.
Dropbox Business has over 150,000 paying customers, which includes many well-known universities and colleges such as the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, University College London, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and more.
Dropbox will hope that with the introduction of Dropbox Education, the company will be able to attract more schools, colleges and universities to use the services in the near term.
