Home > News

How Dropbox Is Improving Workflow with New Extensions

By Tracey Rosenberger
How Dropbox Is Improving Workflow with New Extensions Featured Image

Using technology to complete tasks for your business or personal use has come a long way since the early days of word processors and dot matrix printers. The arrival of email and productivity suites expanded capabilities, but now the cloud has opened the door to a new era where there are more and better productivity tools for both employees and individuals. Dropbox is introducing extensions to make it even easier to use tools on different platforms.

Dropbox Extensions

Dropbox has a new way to make the experience a bit more user-friendly. The new Dropbox extensions will create one seamless user experience. Dropbox is moving from a place just to store your files to a place where you can work and collaborate on those files.

In the past, Dropbox has utilized APIs that enabled those who used Adobe, Google, Autodesk, and Microsoft to access the content they stored in Dropbox.

Now, Dropbox has announced new partnerships with Adobe, Autodesk, DocuSign, Vimeo, airSlate, HelloSign, Nitro, Smallpdf, and Pixlr. The new extensions will use hooks into these third-party apps and services, allowing you to go directly to the productivity app from the document you want to edit.

How the Extensions Work

To work with a Dropbox file in another app, all you will need to do is hover your mouse over a file in Dropbox. Then an “open with” menu will appear showing available options for working with that file. For example, when you hover over a PDF file, you will only see app options that work with PDFs. Apps like Vimeo won’t be listed. When you open the file, it will open in a new browser tab so you can make the changes you need. You can save it directly, then, back to your Dropbox folder.

dropbox-extensions-work-flow

What You Can Do with Dropbox Extensions

Here are several examples of how you may be able to use the new extensions:

  • Create a contract and take it all the way from a draft through a final signed PDF
  • Fax documents directly from the Dropbox file
  • Annotate and edit videos and images in Dropbox
  • Give real-time feedback on files
  • Save updates to files in your shared folders,so that your whole team has the most current version.
  • Collaborate on a video file in Vimeo by having multiple people comment and annotate the files. Leave time-coded comments on specific parts of video files.

These new extensions will be available beginning November 27, and they will be available to all Dropbox users, even those on the free plan. Dropbox is starting small, with only ten integrations ready to roll, but more app partnerships are in the works. For example, Dropbox is entering a partnership with Zoom that will give users the ability to conference-call directly from Dropbox and provide access to documents found there.

Dropbox is now a starting point for tasks such as PDF editing, eSignatures, and video annotation. Should be just as easy to use your favorite combinations of apps as it is to use various tools from the same provider. These new extensions allow for fluid movement between apps. So if you are already using Dropbox to store your files, you will now be able to work with them without having to go to another platform.

Image credit: Dropbox

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Tracey Rosenberger Avatar
Tracey Rosenberger
Tracey Rosenberger spent 26 years teaching elementary students, using technology to enhance learning. Now she’s excited to share helpful technology with teachers and everyone else who sees tech as intimidating.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.