Dropbox is going to have Office 365 integration

In a slightly surprising move, Microsoft has teamed up with Dropbox in order to bring Office 365 integration to the service, and to allow Dropbox users to play with their Office documents straight from their Dropbox folders.

There are four main components to the deal: quick-editing Office 365 documents from the Dropbox mobile app, accessing Dropbox documents from Office, sharing Dropbox links of Office apps, and Dropbox creating first-party apps for Microsoft’s own mobile phones. The deal also means that Microsoft can’t sell Office 365 and then try and force users to use OneDrive, which I’m sure it would love to do. Instead Microsoft has to let users pick their favourite cloud storage option.

So why the deal? Well it’s likely to do with the fact that Dropbox is far more popular than OneDrive is, with hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Simply put, Microsoft can’t ignore Dropbox’s importance in the world of cloud back-ups if it wants to push people to subscribe to Office 365 rather than simply buying the desktop version of Office.

That being said, there are many incentives to choosing OneDrive, specifically unlimited free storage for Office 365 subscribers, but making people transition isn’t likely to be an easy process so Microsoft might as well appease them until OneDrive becomes a much bigger entity.