Dropbox Announces 'Project Harmony', Brings Mailbox to More Platforms

At a press event in San Francisco earlier today, Dropbox announced not one, but two major changes in their insanely popular cloud file storage service, which just hit an impressive 275 million users. The first and perhaps more impressive bit of news is the announcement of what Dropbox is calling ‘Project Harmony’, a plugin for Microsoft Office that brings Google Docs style collaborative functionality to Microsoft’s desktop office suite, including Word, Powerpoint, and Excel.

The way it works is simple: just install Harmony, and you’ll see a new indicator letting you know who is editing your shared documents and lets you have a conversation with them. If it works half as well as it looks, this could be a real challenger for the likes of Google Docs – many businesses still rely on Microsoft’s Office suite to get work done, so this could be a huge hit for a large portion of the market. No word yet on compatibility, however I’d imagine Dropbox will be supporting most major versions of Office. Dropbox says they’ll be saying more about Project Harmony this Friday.

That’s far from all, however, as Dropbox has also announced some major news on its Mailbox mail client, which was released on iOS last year to much fanfare and within just a little over a month acquired by the Dropbox team. Not only is Dropbox getting an update on iOS which brings a new “Auto-Swipe” feature that allows you to teach Mailbox which conversations to automatically archive in the future, but the company is also launching Mailbox on two entirely new platforms – Android and Mac.

Dropbox on Android appears to work nearly exactly as it does on iOS, and its available starting today on Google Play for those with Android smartphones. (No word yet on a tablet optimized version.) Mailbox for Mac, meanwhile, won’t be released for quite some time and will instead arrive first as a beta version in the future to those who sign up for early access.

On top of all that, Dropbox has also announced that they’ve opened up Dropbox for Business to all, giving everyone access to Dropbox’s take on business oriented cloud file storage. Users will be able to “easily access both [personal and business] Dropboxes from any of their devices,” implying Dropbox for Business should work just the same as it always has.