I first wrote about the prospects for DropBox in the Enterprise in September 2008. Back them quite a few people were excited about the new company and even more excited by the possibilities of a version designed for business, with centralised management, roles - and perhaps a bit more security.

But it seemed that DropBox was steering well away from the enterprise market. Yes it has tweaked its Web interface and launched some nice mobile products , but there's been appreciable for the Enterprise user. But what's this? Thanks to a little Google serendipity I found dl.dropbox.com/u/5135637/teams.html: containing the details of DropBox For Teams, which has apparently been in very limited beta for 3 months or so.

The page also includes details of the product, an indication of some yet-to-be-implemented feature, and prices that suggest that DropBox is going after businesses with deep corporate pockets.

The main features of the current beta are (according to the undated document on the page):

  • Centralised billing and administration - The company gets a pool of license that they can assign to users as required.
  • Pooled storage quotas - instead of individual storage limits, every user gets to share the single quota assigned to the pool and any file that appears in multiple users' folders only count once (this is a substantial change from conventional DropBox usage where sharing a 1GB file with a colleague will eat up 1GB from both users' quotas).
  • Versioning - Dubbed 'DropBox Rewind', this sounds similar to the existing ' DropBox Packrat' functionality that is a chargeable extra for existing accounts. It allows users to roll files to previous versions that were stored on the system.

    The same document says that a future improvements will include:

  • Group shared folders - which s going to be DropBox's attempt at group permissions controls. An administrator will be able to create groups, such as 'marketing' or 'administration' and assign users to one or more groups. Each group can be given their own 'home' shared folder in which assigned users' Dropboxes appear. "Over time" a permission system will be added to control who can write and read from which folders. At the moment the details sound rather hazy.

    What isn't so hazy is the pricing. Currently the company is proposing an annual charge of $795 per year for 5 users and 350GB of shared storage. Additional users are $125 a pop (which I presume will get you some more storage) and you can buy additional storage in 100GB chunks for $200 a year.

    My guess is that this price plan will be revised, perhaps with additional tiers. DropBox obviously has full access to their users' storage statistics and I don't, nonetheless I would be very surprised if most moderately sized businesses have teams of 5 needing to share 70GB of files each. Most that I come across are interested in using DropBox as a collaboration tool, rather than an off-site back-up system and would probably prefer a cheaper plan with less storage or perhaps the same price with 10 seats and 20GB of shared storage. Let me know if you disagree.

    A couple of final notes:

    The system looks to be designed for medium sized businesses only. Larger firms are likely to want administration integrated with the rest of their file-serving infrastructure, but that's fine - DropBox's sweet simplicity has always seemed to be best suited to for small and medium-sized outfits.

    Security: The document makes mention of strong security, but there's no explicit mention of any additional security measures over the existing DropBox set up. So there's still no ability to choose your own encryption key.
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