Dropbox and Slack, two well-known and widely used cloud-based products, have rolled out new features to attract more customers.

The common theme among the new changes is scaling the existing products to work for the entire company instead of just a small team or group. Currently, both these services have a common weakness, which is their tendency to create fragmentation and reinforce silos because only a small group of workers can adopt them for their own use. Typically, it’s only for a team or an informal group of workers who have to collaborate together.

Though the existing features make it convenient for small groups of people to use them, it creates problems for IT departments as the existing features do not support a company-wide collaboration and use. That has changed with these new enhancements.

Dropbox’s new feature called “Dropbox Smart Sync” allows users to view all the files stored in the cloud, in their local machine as well. This way, the storage space needed in local machines can remain the same, and yet users can browse through unlimited data, and even download just what they want. An example released by the company shows that users working with just 128 GB of hard drive space can browse through terabytes of data to find what they want. Once they identify the file they want, they can simply download it to their local machine. Earlier, users needed a web browser to log in and view files, but those additional steps are not needed now.

Another new feature from Dropbox is called “Paper”, that is expected to provide a flexible platform for employees of different departments to collaborate with each other for creating, reviewing, and editing documents within an organization. Both these features encourage a company-wide access, rather than just small groups.

Like Dropbox, Slack has also expanded its features. The Slack Enterprise Grid allows companies to create an unlimited number of workspaces, so different groups can work together, and at the same time can collaborate across different groups. Currently, only a single workspace exists for the entire organization. While this may work for an organization with about 500 employees, it can get too overwhelming for an organization with say 20,000 employees. To overcome this restriction, Slack’s new features make it convenient to create many small workspaces, so it can be scaled for the entire organization as well.

This feature comes with an administrative layer to help wrap everything together and to manage all the different workspaces and communications. All this means, as an employee, you can find employees who are in other departments and workspaces and collaborate with them if you have to. But, you won’t have to read through all the messages that transpire in the other groups.

These new features from both Dropbox and Slack augur well for users, and more importantly, it shows a growing and maturing cloud market. The rolling out of such features means these companies are eyeing for a larger market share and want to stay on top of competition. Such developments are sure to increase cloud adoption, that in turn, can make collaboration and working much easier, simpler and more convenient than before.

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