
Last November, Dropbox pledged that its business users would gain the ability to access their personal file-storage accounts as well, and now the company’s fulfilling that promise. According to The Verge, Dropbox sent an email to business customers about an upcoming press event, stating that the anticipated account-switching features will roll out across all of their devices on April 9. The email also reportedly notes that Dropbox will debut new administration tools.
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That means Dropbox’s business users would no longer have to log in and out (or use multiple browsers or privacy modes) to access documents in both their individual and professional accounts. It’s a move intended to make Dropbox friendlier to business users and thus, the company has said, to improve worker productivity.
See also: 3 Picks For The Best Business File-Sharing Services
Dropbox says that it serves more than 4 million businesses, a number dwarfed by the sheer size of its consumer user base. More than 200 million people use Dropbox to manage more than one billion files, the company says.
Dropbox may need all the help it can get. Google just slashed the price of Google Drive storage to $10 a month for a terabyte of storage—far less than Dropbox’s upper tier of consumer cloud storage, which costs five times as much for half the storage.
Not that Dropbox, which is worth $8 billion, is hurting. But it faces tough competition, and not just from Google. One of its biggest rivals is Box, the cloud storage company that likewise started out catering to consumers, but doubled down on business clients in 2007. Box has reportedly already filed for an initial public offering.
Both services have pros and cons. Box may not be as easy to use or ubiquitous as Dropbox, but it offers the sort of advanced security that companies require. Security has been a sore point for Dropbox.
But the company attracted $350 million in funding last month to bolster its enterprise software division. Some of that should—and probably will—go toward security.
Image courtesy of Dropbox
UPDATE: ReeadWrite asked Dropbox for comment, and a representative acknowledged that an email did go out to business customers about the April 9th event. However, she stops short of confirming the roll-out date for account switching and administrative tools, saying only that the message was “to follow-up on the features we unveiled at our launch of the all-new Dropbox for Business last November” [emphasis added].