With the development of technology, many businesses have come to look for free applications and tools over the Internet that can help boost the company, and one that has largely contributed to them is the creation of Dropbox.
In case a few still haven't heard of Dropbox, it's a free application that allows businesses to easily share documents or files among employees in a cloud storage. At present, the application has global users of more than 275 million.
The company has just revealed a new feature dubbed as "Project Harmony," in its unceasing attempt to provide, well, harmony among users and within documents. The new feature shows new tools for collaboration among Dropbox users, as they edit files in Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint. In short, it provides real-time collaboration among users, with no glitch at all.
"Our Project Harmony will let you collaborate right inside the apps you already use," Dropbox for Business tweeted.
In layman's terms, this is how it works. Picture two people collaborating on Excel application. These two persons can download the file at the same time and see in real time if and when any of them makes changes. In one corner of the screen, there's a chat feature so any of them can discuss and see the collaboration activity. Yes, it is similar to Google Drive.
CEO Drew Houston of Dropbox said the project aims to help people prevent from creating various documents as they pass these files back and forth for collaboration. This will also combine documents coming from varied operating systems or varied versions of Microsoft Office or even Dropbox. The company, apparently, has seamless integration in mind.
"We've designed this to work with any application so there is a lot more to come," said a representative from Dropbox.
What's good to note, however, is that Dropbox has achieved such engineering feat all alone, unlike its rival Box that took the man behind Google Docs, Sam Schillace, first before it could create the Box Notes. With Schillace on board, reports say, of course it has become much easier for rival Box to come up with the Notes. With this, Dropbox stands out over its rival Box.
Further research says company representatives have not released any news on its business model or pricing brackets yet for "Project Harmony," which will roll out to users later in 2014. Before the official launch though, the company plans to have a trial test to some of its existing enterprise customers. The company also said it continues to work on more partnerships to enhance its products and services, so more new information should be expected on its corporate blog as soon as Friday.
