Microsoft and Dropbox announced a new partnership between the two companies today and a commitment to bring integration between Dropbox and Office apps on iOS and Android. Currently Office users rely on local storage for saving files or Microsoft’s own OneDrive service for saving and syncing files, but the newly announced partnership will allow Office users to use the popular Dropbox service as an additional storage and syncing option and introduce new features between the productivity apps and syncing service.
Dropbox integration with the Office apps means users can save files to Dropbox storage without leaving the Office apps, send links to files from Office using Dropbox, open documents from Dropbox in Office directly from the list of files and folders, and more.
In the company’s announcement, Microsoft said that over 35 million Office files are already stored in Dropbox so the integration between the two will likely be popular and welcomed.
Microsoft says the integration with Dropbox will be available through its Office apps for iOS and Android “in the next few weeks” followed by availability through the Web beginning in 2015.
The custom integration goes further than the third-party document picker feature Apple introduced with iOS 8, and Dropbox has committed to adding integration between the Dropbox site and Office set next year in addition to shipping a Windows Phone version of the Dropbox mobile app.
Expect to see updated versions of the mobile Office and Dropbox apps in the coming weeks.
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I would love icloud drive support. Also an icloud drive app. And an easier way to share icloud drive files. Simply because I don’t want to pay for a TB a cloud storage but I need more than 5 gb. :)
Dropbox just made it’s service become just another feature and MS just strengthened itself in cloud services. MS isn’t likely to see much gain to opening up Office to iCloud users. For that to happen iCloud drive access would need to become incredibly popular on Windows and I don’t see that happening. By popular I mean truly used by something other than Apple’s own services like Photo storage.
Where it gets more interesting though is what will Google do now? First MS hands out unlimited drive space to Office 365 users and then this. If Google wants to disrupt MS in businesses and schools more than it has, customers will want a seamless way to move their documents over. MS just did that.
I find it hard to believe that Apple won’t require iCloud Drive support as a condition of authorising the App, one way or another, if Dropbox is on the list.
That’s what I would think as well but they’re not doing it as of yet. MS just isn’t going to go out of their way in my opinion to access iCloud drive for storage unless Apple makes them or the other possibility is if it’s incredibly simple and cheap to implement.
What is “microsoft”?
How about iCloud and Box?