Dropbox has unveiled a new feature of its cloud service – a group editing suite called Paper.
In beta for now and accessible by invitation only, Paper is essentially a Google Docs challenger; giving users the chance to create and edit documents as a group or team, leaving notes and annotations as you all edit files.
Once fully live, Paper will sit within Dropbox, appearing as an option in the sidebar on desktop, for example. It’s already there in fact, and users can click on it in order to join the waiting list for Paper. But what exactly are you getting that you can’t already from the likes of Docs?
Well, those who have already had an early look have been heaping praise on the clean design of Paper, with minimal icons clogging up the screen, and most staying hidden until you select text to edit.
Paper also has the ability to deal with an impressive range of media – YouTube videos and SoundCloud files can be easily dropped in, as can tables, graphs and links to other files on Dropbox.
Much like Google Docs, it’s easy to invite new users to join, with the option to allow them to just comment on the work, or have the ability to edit it fully.
What’s more, Paper also has emoji-like stickers that can be added to comments that appear on the right of the screen, so there’s some fun to be had among the seriousness too.
The biggest question for Paper will be whether it can compete, and stand out, in an area where the alternatives are already fairly solid. Google Docs has already been mentioned several times here, but there’s also the extremely usable Medium, and until now it appeared as though these two had the collaborative arena locked down.
Paper obviously wants to change that, but whether this is the sort of feature update that gets us excited remains to be seen.
