Dropbox Announces Collaborative Document Editing Tool Called ‘Paper’

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Today, Dropbox announced the upcoming release of Paper, a collaborative document editor to take on similar tools from companies like Google and Microsoft. The editor is the next generation of Notes, an app that was being quietly tested earlier this year.

For now, the editor is only a web-based tool for writing and editing documents. As you’d expect, multiple people can edit a single document at once, but it also adds to-do lists that let managers delegate tasks and track them.

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Dropbox is also adding the ability to link documents inside other documents using Dropbox links. By doing this, the documents will show up in line with your main document. If you are editing a document with co-workers, Dropbox gives you the ability to comment anywhere in the document using text or customer stickers.

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In an interview with Engadget, Dropbox Paper product manager Matteus Pan, said that Paper will be to collaborate with co-workers and stay organized.

He cited Paper as a way to collaborate that keeps things from getting overly “messy” in terms of both clean design and organization. The last differentiator is organization and helping teams find their work quicker. “Creation and collaboration are only half the problem,” he said. “The other half is how information is organized and retrieved across an entire company.”

Dropbox Paper is still an invite-only beta web application, which may make you wonder why the company is showing off the tool so early. With critics saying that the $10 billion file syncing company is overvalued, maybe Dropbox is feeling in a bit of a rush to get out a new product.

Dropbox users can join the waitlist by signing in with their Dropbox account credentials at this link. Once you sign up, Dropbox will notify you when you are able to access the collaborative document editing tool.

[via Wired]

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