Business

Dropbox launches DBX Platform to expand commitment to developers and partners

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Published on September 20, 2018

Company reaches new milestone with more than 2B API calls per day and over 500,000 developers building connections to leading applications and tools 

New collaboration and workflow APIs expand developer capabilities; new connections with Atlassian, Autodesk and Microsoft headline expanded portfolio of integrations 

Expanding its commitment to developers and partners, Dropbox today announced DBX Platform—a unified suite of APIs and developer tools for building new capabilities on top of Dropbox. The launch of DBX Platform includes the release of new API capabilities, as well as new integrations with Atlassian’s JIRA Software, Autodesk tools and Microsoft Outlook, which extend Dropbox capabilities into leading productivity tools

Additionally, the company announced it has surpassed two billion API calls daily, with more than 500,000 developers building applications and services on DBX Platform for the smallest of businesses to the largest of enterprises. This momentum is paralleled by enormous end-user adoption, with more than 75 percent of teams linking to one or more third-party solutions. 

“The rise of new productivity tools has changed how people collaborate, but at the cost of reduced transparency and lost time,” said Ross Piper, Head of Ecosystem and Developer Platform at Dropbox. “DBX Platform is the connective tissue for teams and businesses of all sizes. By giving developers greater capabilities to innovate, and strengthening our partner ecosystem, we are able to help teams collaborate in context with their work and the tools they love.” 

Strengthening the DBX Platform partner ecosystem 

To continue supporting those teams that rely on DBX Platform as a common bridge between leading productivity tools, teams and users can leverage a new partner integration with Atlassian’s JIRA Software, generally available today. Dropbox has also launched sign-ups for early access to a new add-in within the Outlook email service from Microsoft. Additionally, Dropbox is announcing a new integration with Autodesk, coming soon, allowing users to access their content directly in the AutoCAD desktop application, which expands the company’s current integrations with AutoCAD and Autodesk cloud mobile applications. These connections combine core Dropbox sync and collaboration capabilities with the functional strength and scale of each partner. In turn, these additions strengthen a deep ecosystem of existing integrations from DBX Platform partners including Adobe, DocuSign, Facebook, Google, Salesforce, Slack and more to come.

New and expanded API capabilities on DBX Platform 

With developers playing a key role in the growth and scale of DBX Platform, Dropbox recently released three new APIs to its expanding portfolio of endpoints. Now generally accessible at no cost, these tools include: 

  • The new Metadata API, which enables developers to assign custom metadata labels and values to Dropbox files through their third party applications, making information more easily searchable.
  • The new File Requests API, which enables developers to automate the creation of file requests and embed requests into other workflows. This new endpoint expands a widely used Dropbox feature that allows users to collect files and images from others through a simple link. 
  • The recently released Paper API, which enables developers to build Paper integrations directly into third-party applications, with create and edit functionality. Additionally, Dropbox recently announced new design tool integrations for Paper, bringing InVisionFigma embeds, Trello boards visualization, as well as Sketch file previews. 

These newly released APIs are all built on Dropbox API V2, which originally debuted in 2015 in order to improve usability and consistency of the platform. Dropbox is also planning UI and performance enhancements to its Chooser and Saver Drop-ins later this year.”

Partner and customer momentum with DBX Platform

  • “Atlassian has a deep history with Dropbox, first integrating with Hipchat, and more recently, our JIRA project management platform,” said Max Mancini, head of Ecosystem at Atlassian. “In doing so, we’re thrilled to extend the capabilities of Dropbox with the scale of the Atlassian Marketplace, and bring our customers even greater value.”
  • “The cloud is transforming the way designers and engineers collaborate,” said Jim Quanci, senior director of Partner Development, Autodesk. “Our technology partnership with Dropbox enhances Autodesk desktop design and engineering tools like AutoCAD and enables teams to design and create incredible things. Now our joint customers can iterate faster, share and communicate changes more widely and create amazing designs in less time.”
  • "We knew Dropbox core functionality would make it easy to share a consistent set of documents across our 100 plus field-based service technicians, but the Dropbox API has been the true driver of our success," said Brandt Companies business analyst, Kevin Underwood. "Using the API to automate the process of completing, submitting and approving all documentation related to our service calls has greatly increased accuracy while helping technicians save 15 minutes per call. With over 1,500 calls completed per month, that has had a huge impact on our business."
  • "When our in-house document management system became slow and unreliable, we were confident we could build our own replacement with Dropbox thanks to its intuitive and well-documented APIs," said Dow Jones software engineer Vivek Sunder. "Our new solution is not only faster and easier to maintain, but also allows users to access all their contracts using Dropbox's user friendly interface."

About Dropbox

Dropbox keeps more than 500 million registered users on the same page with easy-to-use collaboration tools and the fastest, most-reliable file sync platform. From the smallest business to the largest enterprise, we make teamwork better. For more information, please visit dropbox.com/news.

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