Dropbox has a new beta feature out that I think you should know about. While Dropbox is well known as a go-to backup and file sharing platform, few would realize that they’re posed to become much more integrated into our digital world. The trademark feature, and primary reason for the ubiquity within their market, is the utter transparency of their flagship product. Dropbox users tend to forget just how seamless Dropbox becomes over time–it just works. Nevertheless, over the past year the company has started branching out.
Dropbox Photos now automatically loads all of the pictures on your dropbox drive into a central, easy to navigate photo repository while enabling automatic backups on your mobile device. While deserving of a post all its own, we won’t dwell on the photo manager here; instead I would like to share another Dropbox product.
Dropbox Paper, when you first navigate to via Dropbox.com, feels a lot like Google Documents and that is no coincidence. Dropbox is now competing directly with Google in the “online collaborative office” products category. While Google adopted the heuristic setout by desktop office software such as Microsoft Office by separating word 
documents from presentation and spreadsheets, Dropbox relaxes these borders. In fact, their current setup has just one category: document. So while Dropbox Paper currently does not offer the same, familiar functionality that some office workers will be looking for, it does offer a novel collaborative interface with support for images, tables, files and other digital objects (Youtube, Twitter and Pinterest come to mind) into a virtual document with collaboration being a central theme. It also offers the option to “present” the document which I could see a lot of use when participating in something like a team meeting or informal presentation.
So what are you waiting for, go check it out!