Dropbox for Business gets security boost as firm opens first UK office

DROPBOX HAS ANNOUNCED a number of enhancements to its Dropbox for Business cloud storage service.

The company made the announcements at the launch of its London office, the first overseas outpost for the US firm.

New additions to be rolled out over the coming months begin today for early access users, including enhanced security measures for documents and folders. Shared links can now be password protected and expiration dates applied to make each link valid for a limited time. In addition, folders can now be given view-only permissions for use when you want to share with colleagues but don't want them meddling.

Following 'soon' will be full text search of documents. All files uploaded to Dropbox will become fully indexed in real time and users will be able to search by any word used throughout the document. At the launch on Wednesday, Dropbox demonstrated uploading and indexing a document in under 10 seconds.

At the same time the company will launch its collaboration service Project Harmony. This will allow collaborators to communicate and work together online, but unlike rival services, Project Harmony will work within third-party applications such as Microsoft Office, rather than as a separate package.

Head of Product at Dropbox for Business Ilya Fushman told The INQUIRER, 'Our focus has historically been on being increasingly cross-platform. If you look at a typical business user, they're using a variety of devices, and creating that bridge is something that we've invested all of our company energy in.'

Two new APIs are available today in the developer production beta for developers, one for document previews and one for shared folders. The document preview API allows files to be viewed across operating systems and form factors without worrying about issues of formatting. The shared folder API will allow deep integration with third-party applications.

Fushman continued, 'We know we have the best syncing, and that's going to be the differentiating factor because ultimately, people try different things but they always come back to the service that gives them peace of mind that when they upload a file, that it's going to be available on their device.'

Dropbox will announced the schedule for the rollout of the new features soon.

Last week, Dropbox was accused by maverick NSA contractor Edward Snowden as being ' hostile towards privacy', recommending that users migrate to Spideroak instead, despite promises from Dropbox to be more transparent about information requests from the authorities. µ