Dropbox, the online storage service, has just launched a new service on Tuesday to help students with regards to their education. The new service will also assist college faculty and staff in collaborating files while they’re at the school. With this new feature, schools are able to pay $50 per user, per year for Dropbox Education. This is a version for the company’s premium offering for organizations that are targeted for educational institutions, especially those who are of the cost-sensitive sort.
Dropbox Education Launched to Help Students, College Faculty, and Staff
It is clear that Dropbox is trying to sell off more paid services, however, their offerings have been primarily aimed towards businesses. With this new Education platform, it will cost much less than what you would normally get when subscribing for the cloud storage company’s services if you’re opting for it as a business. To recall, business plans would typically run from $150 to $300 per user, per month.
This is a move that might even give the company a larger foothold in the lucrative education industry. Furthermore, Dropbox Education comes at a time when the firm is pulling out a lot of stops to expand their business beyond a large base of free consumer users.
With this new Education platform, it is designed to allow college staff, faculty, as well as grad students in order to work together with the use of cloud storage. Also, the new service will allow IT administrators to control the security of the shared files and folders. It will also allow for the integration of popular education software, which include InCommon, Turnitin, and Blackboard.
“Education” is able to give schools 15GB worth of storage per paid user. Also, it will require schools to purchase a minimum of 300 slots. Therefore, the minimum amount that educational institutions would have to shell out to take advantage of this service is $1,500 per year. Individual users are able to consume as much or as little as they want provided they stay within the allotted storage space. Overall, this would mean that a school will have a total storage pool of 4.5TB for all the users to share.
Dropbox director of education Jason Katcher stated that this new service is just the first iteration of “Education” and it will be targeted to a fairly small niche. The targeted markets would be that of faculty, graduate students, and staff that can be found in colleges and in universities.