Abstract, from the company of the same name headquartered in San Francisco, offers a collaboration tool for developers and others, featuring a version controlled master file set and approval workflow.
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Dropbox Paper
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Dropbox Paper is a web-based, co-editing tool that includes word processing, document creation and coordination features.
The tool is free to use and allows multiple people to collaborate on a document.
When collaborating with a team on content creation with the purpose of bringing multiple inputs in a nonstructured or nonfixed media type, this is a great choice because of its diversity of content and collaboration tools, however, if you are looking to have high flexibility in a particular content creation stream, for example, sophisticated text editing or presentation, there are a lot of strong competitors out there.
With Dropbox Paper, I can insert images and videos into your document, to make the document more visual, which is helpful for creating newsletters and simple flyers.
Once you create a document, you can save it as a template to be reused as a starting point for creating new documents.
Dropbox Paper has some basic formatting features like bolding text, adding links, and creating H1 and H2 headings.
You can insert tables into your Dropbox Paper document
Dropbox Paper also has an unusual but helpful feature, and that is the time line feature.
Abstract has a difficult learning curve. If a feature-branch workflow is new to you, then it will take some getting used to. They make a lot of updates to the interface and these feature releases get ahead of their documentation. They rely heavily on an excellent customer support team and are present on various Slack channels to help design professionals with issues.
Abstract by nature is complex and has to respond to whatever changes in Sketch. So there are frequent issues. Support can be slow to respond and are not always helpful, but they are quick to find and patch the bugs. Overall, it's not the best support, but it hasn't been detrimental.
I was not part of the decision making to acquire the Dropbox tool against any of the other options and competitors. However, I can assume that the fact that we have been using Dropbox File Management for many years and many important files are stored and shared in the tool everyday, the adding of Dropbox Paper should have been felt very natural.
Dropbox Paper has allowed all of our employees to be much more productive and on track even when we can't be in the office, which from a management standpoint is a huge positive impact. They know that productivity isn't slowing or lacking when everyone isn't actually sitting in the office under their watchful eye.
It has had a huge impact on our turn around time and speed of getting more work and projects completed. The more work you can effectively get done in a time period means more money for the bottom line.
It has made the majority of our team members more accountable and reliable when they know everyone is working together on something and each person has their own checklist of items to complete. It is especially helpful that everyone can see the same checklist, so everyone knows what each other is accomplishing.
