One of the most intriguing announcements from Dropbox this morning was “Project Harmony,” a Google Docs-like tool intended to make it easy for groups to work together on Microsoft Office documents. The company announced the tool as part of its big debut of Dropbox for Business on Wednesday.
Document sharing can still be a painful process, and Project Harmony appears to have some handy features for sidestepping the back-and-forth with emailed documents many people experience in business settings. When Dropbox files sync, a little green check mark appears to let users know everything is uploaded; with Project Harmony, that little checkbox takes center stage.
When a user opens a PowerPoint presentation in Project Harmony, for example, that green check mark lives on the right side of the window. When a collaborator joins that presentation, a plus one (+1) appears. This lets everyone know there is more than one person working on a document, and all involved can use an instant messaging tool right inside the document.
Dropbox CEO Drew Houston said the tool will integrate with other document platforms beyond Office. The Project Harmony tool is supposed to let users to work together on documents even if they’re on different operating systems (think Mac vs. PC) or different versions of Dropbox or Microsoft Office.
Image of Dropbox’s Matt Holden introducing Project Harmony by Adriana Lee for ReadWrite
