After a multi-month preview, Dropbox today announced that it is generally releasing its groups feature to business customers, along with an API that will allow IT departments to integrate the capability into their normal organizational flow. Groups allows companies that use Dropbox to segment their employee base to quickly assign access to various files and folders.
Dropbox, a company that sells cloud storage and collaboration tools, is increasing its focus on larger customers. Its Dropbox for Business product competes with offerings from Google, Microsoft, Box, and others.
According to the company, 12,000 companies requested “early access” to the groups product. That’s a decent percentage of the 100,000 — a number quoted by Dropbox to TechCrunch during a phone call — organizations that are customers of its business service.
Dropbox also claims 300 million registered users, a different metric than active users. That figure has been quoted by the media since at least last May, making it a somewhat dated statistic.
More broadly, Dropbox is going after the corporate market, where large-dollar contracts exist. To do so, it must build out its set of IT-facing features. Hence, groups. The company faces stiff competition, as its early edge in cloud storage has been under assault by startups, and technology incumbents alike. Dropbox is also considered to be an IPO candidate for this year, though its financial health has remained mostly occluded in recent time.