Dropbox Hits 200M Users, Unveils New “For Business” Client Combining Work And Personal Files

CEO Drew Houston today announced that Dropbox has hit 200 million users, up from 175 million in July. He said “Today we’re here to talk about Dropbox for business.” He later revealed the new Dropbox For Business client that securely houses both a user’s personal and work files separately, but in one tabbed interface.

All the new products today are designed to maximize security and convince enterprises that Dropbox isn’t just a frilly consumer tool.

Today’s news focused on enterprise, whereas Dropbox’s last press event in May focused on developers, and saw it announce it had hit 175 million users, up from 100 million in November 2012. At that event it launched the Datastore API to let app developers save metadata to the cloud, such a user’s state in their apps (like what levels they’d completed in a game. It also launched the Drop-Ins API to let third-party apps pull in a user’s Dropbox files.

The Pains Of The Double Life

Houston started today’s event by recounting the Dropbox origin story. He was trying to do work on the bus but forgot his thumbdrive and found himself unable to work. He went on to say he hoped there were many things we soon won’t have to do like “carry our little thumbdrives…back up our computers…[and] send emails to ourselves.”

Houston then brought out fashion company BCBG’s CIO Nader Karimi to explain how hard keeping the company’s data straight was without Dropbox. He detailed how the company can use Dropbox to securely share legal documents.

Drew begins to explain the annoyance of having both personal and work information on the same account. Dropbox originally thought it would just offer account switching, but soon realized that if that takes 15 seconds each time and it has 200 million users, it would waste 1000 years of its users’ time ever day.

“People think there’s this consumer version of Dropbox, and there’s this enterprising version of Dropbox and we think that’s ridiculous. There should only be one” Houston proclaimed. ”To really do this right, you’d have to rebuild Dropbox. But then we thought we’ve been hired all these great people, let’s let them rip on it. Now, I’m so excited to introduce the all new dropbox for business. We’ve rebuilt everything.”

The New Dropbox For Business

With the new Dropbox For Business client that will be rolled out early next year, users can view their personal files in one tab, and their work files in another tab, without having to use multiple windows. If people already have separate business and personal accounts, they can pair them with the new tool. In a blog post (PDF), co-founders Houston and CTO Arash Ferdowsi explained “It’ll be like having your house keys and your work keycard on the same keychain.”

A new notifications bar lets you view alerts from both sets of files, or filter to see only one category. Dropbox has redesigned the mobile business client to offer a similar interface to the web for consistency. Developers can also use the Chooser and Saver APIs to let users access any of their files inside third-party apps.

The update puts a heavy emphasis on controls for CIOs and IT teams. The new Sharing Audit Logs feature shows admins exactly who is sharing what with who, when. Security teams can easily block sharing of certain files outside of specific teams, or prevent an employee from having their personal files accessible on their work computer.

Another new feature called Account Transfer helps businesses when they need to remove access to certain files from an employee that’s leaving the company or switching teams. An admin can select an heir to that employee’s files, allowing them to shift all the contents of someone’s business folder to someone new. A Remote Wipe feature also makes sure employees don’t still have access to any of their old business files on any of their devices, and protects data if a device is stolen.

If the products are a hit, they could boost Dropbox’s status with lucrative enterprise customers. Right now it’s competing with Box and as of today, with Amazon’s new WorkSpaces virtual desktop enterprise cloud product that launched today. But since Dropbox made its name as a consumer product, most businesses discounted it.

And really, until today, Dropbox didn’t have the permissions and security controls to really make the grade. The battle for the enterprise cloud just got a lot more interesting.