Dropbox makes over business edition

Cloud storage and file sharing service Dropbox has revamped its corporate offering, renaming it Dropbox for Business, and adding new single sign-on (SSO) functionality.

According to Anand Subramani, product manager at Dropbox, SSO was one of the most frequently requested features by the company's business customers.

"SSO works behind the scenes to let users sign in just once to a central identity provider, like Active Directory, and securely access all their business apps, like Dropbox," Subramani said in a blog post.

"With SSO, companies can put their existing trusted identity provider in charge of the authentication process," he added.

In order to enable SSO, Dropbox has partnered with a number of identity service providers, such as Ping Identity, Okta, OneLogin, Centrify, and Symplified, and will begin rolling out the functionality in May.

The company further claims that, as it is using the industry-standard Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), its SSO service will integrate easily with any large identity provider customers may already be using that supports SAML.

Moreover, organisations that have built their own federated authentication process will also be able to integrate Dropbox with that, providing it uses SAML.

The introduction of single sign on follows the release of a new admin console for the product in February, which enforced two-factor authentication with the aim of making it easier for administrators to manage accounts.

Subramani also shed some light on why the firm has decided to drop the name Dropbox for Teams for its business offering. "With all the changes we're making to create a Dropbox that's better for companies both large and small, it's become clear that the name Dropbox for Teams' doesn't quite fit anymore.

"To better [represent] the features we're building ... we realise the time has come to rename to Dropbox for Business."