Dropbox for Businesses is here, single sign-on feature planned

Dropbox is looking to attract businesses into its fold. In a major announcement, the cloud storage service has rechristened Dropbox for Teams to Dropbox for Businesses. The company is also planning a single sign-on feature for larger businesses.

In a blog post announcing the rebranding, Dropbox Team member Sheila Vashee wrote that ever since Dropbox launched the new admin console for teams using the cloud service in February, the company had started to feel that “Dropbox for Teams” seemed like a small name. “Dropbox for Businesses” now pretty much encompasses the size of the services offered by Dropbox, she said. The thought behind it seems to be that the service can help connect a lot more people than merely a team. And the name sounds more professional too.

It’s a great time to be a Dropbox for Businesses user

Dropbox’s much-requested single sign-on feature means fewer passwords to remember to access data. For IT admins, this feature will provide for additional security and administrative management. Dropbox says that it is working with identity provider partners such as Ping Identity, Okta, OneLogin, Centrify and Symplified to bring single sign-on to consumers by next month.

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Back in February, Dropbox launched a new admin console and new sharing controls to help admins manage their groups. In order to increase visibility, admins can view recent activity, web sessions, linked devices and even third-party apps of the team members. The console also gives better control to admins, which includes setting sharing control levels, enabling two-step verification and more.

Dropbox says that it is used in 95 percent of the Fortune 500 companies and in over 2 million businesses already. It also boasts of over 600 million files saved to Dropbox by businesses every week. The company has meticulously been adding features and tools for its business users over the past few months, and clearly, the big business is where its mind is while its regular user base grows steadily.

Dropbox has also been working on a better user experience. A desktop redesign last month saw the addition of notifications that saved users the hassle of refreshing pages over and over.

The company has also been associating itself with other services in a major way. Last week, Dropbox announced that Yahoo! Mail would now incorporate Dropbox into its services. You can now upload images to and download images from your Dropbox account linked to your Yahoo! ID.