Dropbox for Teams: Cloud File Syncing for the Enterprise

Near-ubiquitous cloud storage vendor Dropbox is upping its enterprise game with the launch of Dropbox for Teams, a new offering that adds phone support, business-class administrative options, centralized billing, and “tons more space” to the core experience.

According to Dropbox’s official blog entry on the launch, licenses start at $795 per year for five users, with additional seats priced at $125 each per year. Those five users get a 1000 gigabyte storage pool to share, and every seat above that garners another 200 gigabytes. And the Pack Rat add-on, which keeps past revisions and deleted files indefinitely for later recovery, is included for every user in that base price.

A large part of the value proposition of Dropbox for Teams is the same as the flagship offering’s: You apparently can collaborate with your colleagues, instantly sharing files between tablets, smartphones and desktops. Admittedly, that’s the same pitch we’ve heard from so many cloud storage vendors by now.

But the new stuff in Dropbox for Teams speaks to a certain enterprise maturity. It enables organizations to put their entire Dropbox deployment on a single bill and handle account provisioning and migration from a core console. In other words, it’s a potentially handy tool with a wide potential audience.

But Dropbox still doesn’t have a formal channel play. And despite its popularity and developing enterprise offering, it’s lagging behind VAR-friendly competitors like Box.net just in terms of sheer buzz around the business. I can’t help but wonder if those two facts are related.