Dropbox Paper vs. Socialtext (discontinued)

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.

Incentivized

We use Social Text as a platform to air our issues with different departments. We voice our concerns and suggestions so we can help find a solution to the problems we incur on a daily basis. We need to have social text as an app so we can communicate in real time not only during work hours.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Version history - Always keeps the edited versions and one can revert back any time
• Creating and Editing an article is very easy and intutive
• Sharing the articles with peers

• No spell check feature.
• No going back to "old versions" once changes are made they are permanent, with no restriction setting or ability to see previous versions.

Incentivized

• Search needs a ton of improvements. It was very slow a year ago
• Search result quality was also not that good
• I know they have improved their UI recently but when i used it last year it did not really have any design elements which could be used to make the articles look more presentable. It was important for us as we used it for external communication as well.

We have a lot of info in Socialtext already. It would be hard to get all that info out and port it to a different system

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.

Incentivized

I frankly like Confluence better than socialtext because of the speed and the quality of search. They also have better design elements which can help make the articles pleasant to the eyes.

• 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.

Incentivized

• We get solutions to concerns much faster
• We promote interactions with the other depts
• We listen and have discussions