Dropbox announces Paper, its take on collaborative document editing

Dropbox today announced the upcoming release of Paper, a collaborative document editor to take on similar offerings from Google, Microsoft, and smaller players like Quip. It’s the next generation of Notes, an app it began quietly testing earlier this year. The company gave a preview of the app to our old colleague Nathan Ingraham, and for now it’s a web-only tool for writing and editing documents. As you’d expect, multiple people can edit the documents at once, but it also adds to-do lists that lets managers delegate tasks and track them. (In this it’s like a much less robust version of Asana.)

If you like documents in your documents, you can add them (via Dropbox links) and they’ll show up in line. Or you can create small photo galleries. If you’re editing with co-workers, you can comment anywhere in the document, via text or custom stickers.

The curious thing here is why Dropbox is showing off a feature that’s still invite-only and web-only. But with the drumbeat of critics (ahem) saying the $10 billion file syncing company is overvalued, maybe it’s feeling in a bit of a rush to get new products out the door. Anyway, we look forward to trying it out, if Dropbox ever gets back to us.