Dropbox Partners With Adobe On PDF Tool

Dropbox has found a new way to slurp up new customers by partnering with Adobe on a PDF tool that claims to make it easier to open PDFs straight from Dropbox.

Starting from today, users will be able to add their Dropbox account from the latest versions of Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Reader desktop apps, meaning they can open PDFs stored in Dropbox right from within the app.

iOS

In the coming months, the feature also extends to being able to annotate and comment on PDFs stored in Dropbox from iPhones and iPads, using Acrobat Reader mobile. This will be due on Android in 2016.

“With more than 18 billion PDF files stored in Dropbox, they’re critical to how many of our users get work done,” said Dropbox’s announcement today. “In fact, they’re one of the most common business file types in Dropbox. So we asked ourselves, how can we make working with PDFs even easier in Dropbox?

“That’s the idea behind our new partnership with Adobe. We want you to be able to collaborate with PDF files on Dropbox in as few steps, clicks, or swipes as possible. Ultimately, we want you to be able to work with any kind of file easily, from viewing to editing to sharing. Our collaboration with Adobe, the inventor of the PDF, is the next step in this process.”

The new marriage sees both companies targeting their non-native audience. With an Adobe hook up, Dropbox could now delve deeper into a more enterprise-orientated customer base, and Adobe could get access to more consumer-facing users. Up until now, Dropbox has suffered from strong enterprise storage competition from the likes of Microsoft and Google.

The announcement from Adobe is just one of many recently, as the Photoshop maker looks to beef up its cloud offerings, especially Document Cloud, a service specialising in e-signatures.

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