Microsoft and Dropbox Join Forces

Published on November 11, 2014

Microsoft recently announced their new partnership with Dropbox, with improved optimization between the two. We're expecting to see the Microsoft Office suite better supported by Dropbox, as well as Dropbox being directly integrated into the Office products themselves.

This development is particularly exciting after seeing Box integrated with Office 365, and OneDrive improved with unlimited storage.

The overall improvements

This integration will give us 4 main improvements between the Office/Dropbox services.

  1. The ability to quickly edit Office documents from the Dropbox mobile app
  2. The ability to access Dropbox docs from Office apps
  3. The ability to share Dropbox links of Office apps
  4. The creation of first-party Dropbox apps specifically for Microsoft's mobile offerings

The details

Apparently, Microsoft can still sell Office 365 without pushing OneDrive (or OneDrive for Business) which allows it to vend service options to all who already use Dropbox. This is no surprise, seeing as Dropbox services 80,000 paying businesses of years and millions of users.

Kirk Koenigsbauer, head of Microsoft’s Office Engineering team, explains their decision further:

"Access to Dropbox content popped as one of the very first [Office for iPad] requests that customers had. They want access to where their content is. We’re doing it to make sure customers have a great experience."

All in all, this is a huge win for users and we're excited to see how this integration will play out down the line.