Dropbox Paper wants to shred Slack and Google Docs

It’s hard to say how Dropbox will shift people over from Docs and Office, but at the very least Dropbox is offering a novel solution; rather than having a ton of different documents all for different projects, Paper lets you organize them all into one collaborative narrative.

Not surprisingly, users can add collaborators to the document who can all work together simultaneously.

Any file that’s stored in Dropbox – so, a Word, PowerPoint or Excel document – can be dumped into the Paper document and served up as a preview.

What Dropbox needs right now is a big win. It’s quite possible though it could still easily be a few weeks or more since the announcement was just this morning, and with no idea of how large the wait list is now it wouldn’t be a bad idea to hop on it as soon as possible.

For businesses so invested in our digital lives, tech companies really seem to like naming their products ‘Paper:’ First Facebook, then FiftyThree and now Dropbox. Just like Gmail, items you delete aren’t really deleted until you really, really want to delete them entirely.

The file syncing company told several publications about the release of a new beta version of Paper, an app for creating and collaborating on documents, on Thursday. In particular, the company made it so that you can use its app to share pretty much anything, regardless of what tools you might be using. Recently edited documents, a tab for documents the user has created, documents shared with the user, and a Deleted tab. There are also a few interesting features, like automatic embedding of files with a Dropbox URL, file previews within the document, and a more robust search functionality.

Inside Paper you’ll find a list of “Docs”, a set of Folders, and a list of people you are Following. Naturally, you can comment on everything added to a Paper document, and Dropbox even jumped on the stickers bandwagon – so if a giant skeleton thumbs-up is the only way you can properly express your approval, you’re covered here. If you use Dropbox for storing all of or most of your files, pictures, videos etc., this is likely a strong point for you. Lastly, there’s a “following” feed that lets you see chronological activity on files you own and are shared on. Another advantage Pan pointed out is that Paper will help teams work comparatively quicker. “Creation and collaboration are only half the problem”, he said. The team has been gathering feedback from its customers for months and intends to keep doing so as the beta expands.