Cloud storage firm Dropbox has announced a huge overhaul of its core desktop app, moving away from being a simple shared folder platform and becoming a unified cloud-based workspace.

As well as redesigning the look and feel of its platform, Dropbox has also introduced native support for Google G Suite and Microsoft Office files, as well as native integrations with partners including Atlassian, Zoom and Slack. The changes are designed to make Dropbox the central hub through which organisations do all their work, pulling in content from multiple sources to prevent having to switch between multiple tabs and workspaces.

“When we talk about the experience of using technology at work, what was stunning to me, even a few years ago was like, man, our industry just keeps making things more complicated, and just keeps throwing new stuff onto the pile,” Dropbox founder and CEO Drew Houston told Cloud Pro. “Like, who’s making everything work together?”

“And so we see, for better or worse, there’s no shortage of opportunity to improve the experience, to make it more seamless, to sand down a lot of the rough edges, and give people the best of both worlds, where they have the freedom of choice, and they can benefit from all the different tools that are out there.”

“Increasingly we saw that our customers are seeing Dropbox more as this workspace in which they use the Office suites and things like that, which triggered a pretty big mental shift for us and completely changed the concept of the product that we wanted to build.”

The difference is immediately apparent from the design changes. While folders are still listed in a pane on the left-hand side (which is now an attractive navy colour), the main body of the app is now broken up into multiple sections. At the top is a text field which allows you to add an editable summary of the folders contents or the project it relates to, as well as to-do lists. Files and sub-folders now fit below this, with badges to indicate the owner and any other people who have access. Files can be viewed in either list or grid layout, and important content can be pinned below the description for easy access.

The biggest functional change is that along with traditional desktop files, cloud-based documents from Google’s G Suite can now be stored natively within Dropbox folders. This allows teams to store all the files they’re using in one place, regardless of what software they or their clients are using.

Clicking on a G Suite file launches it in a browser window for editing, with any changes made automatically synced back to Dropbox. Microsoft Office documents can also be edited in the same way thanks to G Suite’s recent addition of Office file format support, or you can use Office Online’s web editor. If you have the desktop Office apps installed, you can still open them with these as normal.

The company has introduced new integrations with videoconferencing provider Zoom, allowing users to launch or join a Zoom meeting from within the Dropbox app, and can also present files from your Dropbox to meeting participants. Thanks to new integrations with Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook calendar, you can also see any upcoming meetings you have with co-workers and add videoconferencing details. New integrations with Slack also allow users to share files or send messages via Slack from within the Dropbox app.

This is part and parcel of Dropbox’s efforts to make its platform more collaboration friendly. As before, users can add comments to individual files (including replies and @-mentions), as well as viewing their team’s activity on them, not just on Dropbox but now also across Zoom and Slack as well. There’s a new ‘team activity’ view within the notifications menu as well, which shows you which files and folders your team has accessed or edited.

Many projects also rely on web-based content, such as informational resources like wikis or web-native SaaS tools. These can now be included in folders as web shortcuts, which will open in a browser window just like a G Suite file.

More integrations are soon to follow, too. The company is working with project management company Atlassian on functions that will allow Trello and Jira users to link these tools more effectively with their Dropbox resources, which Atlassian’s global head of partnerships Bryant Lee told Cloud Pro would be available “over the coming months”. In addition, Dropbox’s global head of business development and partnerships Billy Blau indicated that further integrations with Microsoft and Google’s additional products would be coming in the future.

“Our core premise is ‘Dropbox works with all the applications you use every day’. And if you play that forward, [Microsoft Teams] is an application a lot of people use every day; we need to have an experience that works there,” Blau told Cloud Pro. “So I don’t have timing or specifics, but you could assume in the future, that would be something we’d do.”

The redesigned desktop apps for macOS and Windows are currently in early access, and anyone is able to sign up to try them out, regardless of whether you’re a free, paid or business user. General availability has yet to be announced.

According to Dropbox CTO Quentin Clarke, the process of switching over from the old version to the new one will be seamless. Companies’ existing file structures will remain intact, and there’s no installation required – opted-in Dropbox admins can simply activate it the new interface via a toggle in their admin console.

“We’re constantly maintaining up-to-date client software on millions and millions of desktops around the world all the time. And so we can deploy the software and not turn it on – and then the matter of turning it on is just enablement.”

The new changes will be key for Dropbox’s growth in the enterprise market. Functions like searchability, version history and content centralisation have been highlighted as key considerations for enterprises, but it’s the enhanced collaboration functions that will make businesses it up and take notice, according to analysts.

“The Dropbox enhancements are additive in connecting people and content, rather than replacement of any one application,” said Wayne Kurtzman, IDC’s research director for social and collaboration. “What it does is it changes the narrative for Dropbox from being just file storage into being an enterprise collaborative app. And that brings substantially more value to any given enterprise.”

Salesforce is one of the industry leaders in online customer relationship management (CRM) software, with a key focus on enabling businesses to keep track of clients, potential clients, sales and support issues.

While its higher-tier Professional, Enterprise and Unlimited subscriptions are both expensive and complex due to the sheer number of advanced features they pack in, Salesforce Essentials is cheaper, at £24 per user, per month or £240 per user billed annually. You can have a maximum of 10 users and a minimum of one, which helps to keep costs down compared to its other tiers, which start at £720 per user, per year for Salesforce Lightning Professional.

While the Classic edition of Salesforce is still available to both new and existing customers, we’ve focused on its latest Lightning Experience, which presents a more polished and modern user interface but doesn’t have the traditional layout that longtime users will be familiar with. Although Salesforce hasn’t indicated when Classic will be retired, Lightning will ultimately supersede it.

Essentials also limits the number of extra features it includes. Although you get access to third-party extensions, it lacks advanced forecasting and lead automation tools. A 14-day free trial gives you enough time to work out if this is the CRM solution for you.

Salesforce keeps all user data in the US, with data protection covered by the EU-US Privacy Shield.

Salesforce Essentials review: Getting started

Salesforce Essentials’ Sales home screen opens with a healthy array of dummy data for you to play with and a genuinely helpful guided setup box, which takes users through basic tasks. These include connecting a Google or Office 365 account to easily track customer communications, as well as introducing you to the sales funnel classification system for prospective customers in a variety of industries, You can customise the information you store about contacts, import existing customer data, add your colleagues – if your budget extends to that – and, once you’ve learned your way around and tried a few things out, delete all the trial data so you can start using Salesforce for real.

The first time you log in, you’re asked what you want to get from Salesforce, such as keeping your contacts organised, closer collaboration with colleagues or closing more deals – to help it present you with a set of appropriate guided tours around the service’s features.

Essentials is much more approachable and far lighter on the business buzzwords than its sibling, Salesforce Professional, which makes it a far better choice for anyone who isn’t already fully initiated into the deeper secrets of specialist sales and CRM systems and terminology.

SalesForce’s key advantage is that it replaces the databases, contacts books and spreadsheets a business might use in concert to keep track of clients and sales, and instead provides a unified environment where tracking the status of bids and opportunities is as simple as dragging them from one column to the next, with detailed profiles for you and your colleagues to annotate, so you know exactly where you stand with every customer and project.

The guided tours are rigid and not terribly interactive, but they provide a useful introduction to the service’s terminology and systems. Other tutorials open Salesforce’s integrated help and documentation system, while extensive tutorials are available on Salesforce’s dedicated Trailhead site.

Very early on, you’re pointed towards material showing you how to use features like Leads to record and look up details about potential customers that you’ve not yet contacted or done business with. Although by default only the most recent data you’ve worked with is shown in each category, you can pin a number of different views to be shown by default. We particularly like being given a list of all our active leads and contacts.

Everyone who works with a lead can add notes to their entry so your entire business’s knowledge about and dealings with each client can be assembled in a single, easy-to-find location. Once you’re ready to take your business relationship to the next step and send them quotes and proposals – or at least regard them as someone likely to make a purchase – you can convert that lead into an Opportunity at the click of a button. This process already creates a contact and a customer account for their business.

Once you’ve got an existing relationship with a customer, Salesforce becomes home to your complete archive of data on that company and your contacts there, complete with tools to help remind you to check in and manage recurring business and customer support needs.

Everything’s searchable via a bar at the top of the screen and a powerful setup interface allows you to customise the appearance and behaviour of Essentials’ various modules.

Salesforce Essentials review: Apps, extensions and integrations

The Essentials app launcher is, once again, far less bewilderingly cluttered than that of Salesforce’s higher-cost tiers, limiting itself to three core web app interfaces for sales, customer support tickets and your sales and support usage metrics.

There are also shortcuts to useful tools such as a calendar for keeping track of appointments and targets, which you can configure to sync with Office 365 or Google Calendar; your master list of leads; note-taking tools and a social-media style Chatter tool to help communicate with your colleagues and keep track of their activities. Once open, each of these tools is given its own tab within the Salesforce web app interface, making it easy to navigate between them.

As well as lead tracking and conversion, the Sales interface allows you to assign tasks to yourself and your colleagues, see past and future tasks and client communication events on a calendar, upload and share files and generate reports.

We’re great fans of the Service Console, which lets you log, track and respond to customer service and support requests. You can forward email addresses and link Twitter and Facebook accounts so that all messages and mentions they receive are automatically added to your Salesforce Service Cloud queue for attention, making it incredibly easy to manage your customer support and communication channels.

You can email customers from within the console if you’ve linked a G Suite or Office 365 email address, view both the active ticket and your business’s full history with that customer, upload files, add notes and even link your corporate or staff Twitter profile to pull in social media posts by your customer.

There is, of course, a mobile app to help you do business on the move. Thankfully, rather than simply trying to cram the web browser experience into an app, it’s a genuinely optimised piece of design, opening by default on your business’ Chatter feed to keep you abreast of your colleagues and providing easy access to your organisation’s contacts, support cases, leads, opportunities and more via an expanding list at the right of the screen.

A number of third-party integrations are available, although Salesforce Essentials isn’t as well supported as higher subscription tiers – for example, the QuickBooks integration listed on Salesforce’s small business solutions site doesn’t work with it. However, integrations are available for services including DocuSign digital signing for contracts, Slack for office communication, MailChimp for external announcements, and Dropbox and G Suite for storage, among others.

Salesforce Essentials review: Verdict

Salesforce Essentials is powerful, but accessible enough not to be entirely overwhelming for small business users and its Service Console support ticketing system for customer support is outstanding. It’s also a good introduction to the Salesforce ecosystem for those who’d rather not jump straight into the significantly more complex Professional tier.

However, this is also among the most expensive CRM solutions for small enterprises. Those that just need basic sales tracking and relationship management may be better off with a more inexpensive rival, such as Zoho CRM, which is free for businesses with up to three users and costs just £10 per user, per month after that.

AWS CEO Andy Jassy has said that the cloud giant would spin off from parent company Amazon if regulators forced it too.

During a chat with Recode editor-at-large Kara Swisher at the 2019 Code Conference, Jassy responded to a question about a recent Washington Post report on an agreement between two federal agencies that put Amazon under the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission.

The report follows calls for the breakup of large technology companies from Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic presidential candidate who has Facebook and Google in her sights.

Amazon and AWS often come up in discussions about tech breakups and Jassy said that he didn’t see the benefits of it, but the company would follow regulatory action if it seeks to split the world’s largest cloud provider from its parent.

“I think that when you’re able to build multiple customer experience in different business segments that people really respond to, your business is going to get larger,” he said. “I think as your business gets larger, there’s going to be more scrutiny. We expect it and you have to run the business to be comfortable with that, which is the way we’ve tried to do it.

“I would never say never about anything, but I just don’t see it. Typically, when companies spin off subsidiaries, it’s either because they want to get that company off the financial statements or they just can’t afford to fund the business the way it used to be funded. Neither of those is the case so I just don’t see it.”

Jassy said that spinning off the business wouldn’t be in its customer’s interests because of the extra admin and financial infrastructure it would have to add and deal with would be a “distraction” and potentially disrupt the company’s ability to deploy new services. But, he added, that they wouldn’t have much choice if they were forced.

“I can’t speak to what the government is thinking, or will do, but at the end of the day, we operate in the United States and we will follow the United States laws,” he said. “If we were forced to do it, I guess we would have to.”

Having been with Amazon for more than 20 years, Jassy has insight into how both AWS and Amazon interact, along with AWS’ position in the cloud an IT market, which is significant given roughly half of Amazon’s latest reported operating income came from AWS. 

Salesforce is set to buy data visualisation company Tableau Software for $15.3 billion (£12 billion), as the cloud-centric CRM company looks to boost its analytics capabilities.

The acquisition will be an all-stock deal for Salesforce and is set to be the company’s largest to date. It also plays into Salesforce’s healthy appetite for purchasing companies that can complement its main cloud services; the company has purchased 60 other firms in just 20 years.

While Salesforce already has its own data analytics service in the form of Salesforce Einstein, once the acquisition is complete Tableau’s analytics software is set to augment and expand the CRM platform’s scope for delivering analytics and data visualisation.

“Tableau helps people see and understand data, and Salesforce helps people engage and understand customers. It’s truly the best of both worlds for our customers–bringing together two critical platforms that every customer needs to understand their world,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and co-CEO of Salesforce. “I’m thrilled to welcome Adam [Selipsky, president and CEO of Tableau ] and his team to Salesforce.”

Keith Block, co-CEO at Salesforce added: “Data is the foundation of every digital transformation, and the addition of Tableau will accelerate our ability to deliver customer success by enabling a truly unified and powerful view across all of a customer’s data.”

Selipsky said that by joining Salesforce, Tableau will be able to “help people everywhere see and understand data”.

How exactly Salesforce will work Tableau into augmenting analytics services remains to be seen, as Tableau will still operate independently of the Salesforce band and remain in its Seattle headquarters with Selipsky at its helm.

But it will mean Salesforce is set to gain access to Tableau’s customer base, numbering some 86,000 organisations worldwide, which include Netflix, Schneider Electric, and Verizon.

The acquisition of Tableau is slated to be completed by the close of Salesforce’s third fiscal quarter of its current financial year, which ends 31 October.