First Look | The New Dropbox Spaces

This is a complete restart of Spaces, not a minor upgrade

Over the past few weeks, Dropbox has been showing some analysts and partners a new generation of what introduced last June as Dropbox Smart Workspaces and then later renamed Dropbox Spaces. For some background, see How Dropbox Spaces can help you make sense of distributed work from Dropbox, for example, or my thoughts in Dropbox Launches ‘Smart Workspaces’.

The new Spaces is a significant departure from last year's model. In effect, they have scrapped the earlier approach, or revised it so significantly that it is hard to see the changes as a transition: it is a rethinking and a restart.

If you know all about last year’s Spaces, or just want to jump ahead to what the new Dropbox Spaces are, scroll down to the Welcome to the new Dropbox Spaces section.

TL;DR

For those who are impatient, or want the bottom line first: this version of Dropbox Spaces does not seem like an evolution of the earlier Dropbox Spaces. It’s a radical break.

To put it into the context of what is happening in the marketplace the new Dropbox Spaces seems to have more in common with the Rooms in Google’s new Workspace offering, the replacement of G Suite.

Yes, the new Dropbox Spaces does not have all the other pieces of Google Workspace, like Meet, Gmail, and Calendar, but it does share an orientation around bringing documents…