Dropbox and Box, the cloud storage services have announced new features to give users more tools to work with.
Dropbox, the popular service used to share files on the cloud now allows files from people who are not users, The company determined this featured as “file requests” that bring the possibility of someone loading a file on our personal folder, even if they’re not using Dropbox already. Based on what the company’s considerations, the idea behind this is to avoid chain messages and the proliferation of links going to shared folders with varied content, where each user shares a link to a file or specific folder, and reply with another link to this same file in turn.
In order to begin using these features, users can go to the file request tabs in the main screen, on the left-most menu. Then, they can pick the folder in which to storage whatever other users want to share, and finally, obtain the link created in order to share the service. What’s interesting, though, is that we don’t really need to worry about whether the other user uses Dropbox or not, as anyone can upload anything as long as it does not go over 2GB, and they know the link, On the other hand, the folder creator is the one that has the last say about who can or can not check the contents of any given folder.
Box, too, are offering new features. Amongst them, to edit already stored on the cloud files using Microsoft Office. This comes from a special agreement Box achieved with Microsoft, which allows documents, excel files, or presentations uploaded to Box to be edited on the fly using a web version of Microsoft’s software. The only thing users need to do to use this feature is to go to the file they mean to edit, choose it, and launch Office from the menu, This was confirmed from the official blog, and by the end of the year they plan to integrate this system with the Android, iOS and Windows Phone versions too.
If this still sounds confusing, be sure to check the Box+Office video below:
Box already had some features that allowed this kind of edition to be performed running Google Docs, and that Microsoft themselves already had an agreement with Dropbox in order to make use of their apps.
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