Dropbox Paper: A document editing and collaboration tool.

After almost a year, Dropbox has finally brought Paper out of public beta.

The Dropbox paper is a document editing and collaboration tool. It aims to provide people a workspace with active management and documented change tracking.

But we’ve heard this before, right? This is precisely what the Google G-Suite and Office 365 claim to offer, and frankly, people are paying them for it. What makes Paper stand a chance?

Simplicity, for one. Paper lets go of the toolbar, which gives a multitude of options but creates unnecessary clutter. It aims at creating a simplistic approach, where one would not need to squint at the page to find the actual content. Another feature it offers is real time collaboration, called Smart Sync. It “lets you seamlessly access all your files and folders—whether they’re on your hard drive or in the cloud—right from the desktop. No need to jump into a web browser, and no need to shuffle files if you have more in the cloud than you can fit on your computer,” read the Dropbox blogpost explaining the feature., A Dropbox executive state, “At Paper teams can create, review, organize content in a flexible work space,”. He describes Paper as “one part online document, one part collaboration, one part task management tool, one part content hub.”

Paper also gets one more thing right. It acknowledges competition. It knows that veteran players like Google and Microsoft are out there, and their position in the market has to be respected. “We fully expect Paper to be used in environments where people are using Microsoft and Google products,” says Rob Baesman, Dropbox’s head of product. “That’s the rule, not the exception.”

Another feature that caught our attention was Project Management. One can just add the specific agendas with their time and deadline, and add a collaborator and they will automatically receive the details.

With all this, Dropbox can still only hope to make it big, while the big players eat their early bird pie.