Microsoft to Integrate MS Office with the Dropbox for Increasing the Cloud Productivity

In the recent times, we have seen many market giants and rival companies collaborating for increasing the quality of their product or even their service. One of the latest additions in this is the approach from Microsoft.

Microsoft is coming together with one of their major competitor and has struck a deal with the DropBox Company; this will allow enhanced interoperability between the Dropbox’s cloud storage and Microsoft Office and further improve the file sharing services offered to the businesses as well as consumers.

This partnership was announced on Tuesday and took the entire industry by surprise as it was being terms as a “coopetition” relationship which indicated co-operation as well as competition. This was due to the fact that Dropbox’s name sake consumer service as well as Dropbox for Business was competing against the Microsoft’s OneDrive and OneDrive for Business.

What is the motivation behind this deal? 

The main motivation behind this step is to make the life much easier for the company’s vast number of customers who are currently storing 35 billion Office files in the Dropbox. Although in Microsoft, almost all the Office users completely rely on the OneDrive for Business and OneDrive, Dropbox has managed to amaze people with 300 million people using their service and on the other hand Microsoft Office has about 1.2 billion users.

The driving force behind this deal is one the same line with the other motivations which has encouraged Microsoft to get into partnerships in the recent times. The Company has made a deal with IBM about cloud computing and tie with Salesforce.com.

According to Satya Nadella, CEO, they will keep on looking for possible partnership deals as long as it will yield a considerable amount of benefit for their existing customers by ensuring they are developing products that work together more efficiently and being offered by the teaming up of Microsoft and the other companies.

What in-stored in the future? 

According to Nadella, they will keep on looking for all possible partnerships in the coming months. They understand that at the moment we have “heterogeneous mobile-first cloud-first world” environment and partnerships are becoming the best way to provide excellent services and products to the customers.

With this new partnership of Office and Dropbox, the users will be able to access Dropbox from their office interface and this is being achieved by focusing on the Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Users will be able to make changes to their office files in Dropbox interface and the updated file can be synched between many devices.

In the coming weeks, this updated is expected to be rolled out on Office apps for Android and iOS. The company is hoping to release the web version of the same during the first quarter of 2015. According to this deal, Dropbox will be required to develop a mobile app for the windows platform in the coming few months. This most recent feature will be available to office users having access to Dropbox account as well.