Dropbox announces Microsoft 365 integration, introducing real-time co-authoring of 365 documents

Deemed by the company as one of the most-requested features ever, Dropbox announced the introduction of real-time co-authoring integration with Microsoft 365, earlier today.

What does this mean? Well, basically, according to the official announcement, co-authoring allows multiple team members to collaboratively edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files from desktop, web, and mobile, natively within Dropbox.

The co-authoring capability also allows users to see who’s currently editing the document, to make sure everyone is working on the same version.

The Dropbox-Microsoft integration also includes Dropbox Replay for OneDrive, allowing users to access and bring files from OneDrive to Dropbox Replay easily.

The company has been focusing on its partnership with Microsoft for a while now. Months ago, Dropbox launched an integration with Microsoft Teams, that saw users being able to easily preview, upload, and share content in Dropbox without leaving the Teams app.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 was also updated to access those files through a plugin, and users could enable the AI tool to edit, summarize, and even add new ideas to them.

The new Microsoft 365 – Dropbox integration is just one of the many new releases the company announced earlier today. The other include seamless end-to-end encryption, advanced key management, but also new features to Dropbox Replay, and AI-powered universal search.

These new releases alongside the new real-time co-authoring capability are now available in Dropbox Beta, and users can sign up to try them by accessing this link.

Given the new capability has been one of the most requested features ever, according to Dropbox, it might end up increasing the popularity of both platforms. Microsoft 365, although a versatile productivity suite, still faces serious competition from Google Suite.

However, Dropbox deprecated many of its native integrations with the latter, including the integration with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides

So, the new integration between Dropbox and Microsoft 365 might give the Redmond-based tech giant the edge it needs.

You can read the full blog post here.