How to get started as a Dropbox Business team admin

Congratulations on choosing Dropbox Business! This guide will walk you through eight simple steps to set up your account. Transitioning to Dropbox Business will help your team get in sync, keep their data safe, and stay focused on your most important work. 

As an admin, you can easily add or remove team members, monitor sharing activity, and protect organization data. To get your team collaborating as quickly and successfully as possible, we recommend completing these steps within the first 30 days.

Is there another person who might help set up your team? Learn how to add or change an admin.

Notes before you get started

• If you're a Dropbox Business team member, check out the getting started guide for team members.
• If you're the admin of a Dropbox Business team with more than 250 team members, check out the getting started guide for large teams.

1. Give your team a space to work together

With a well-organized team space, your team can start getting the most out of Dropbox Business, right away. Your team has a shared workspace that functions like a shared drive. Create folders just for certain people, or for your whole team. The default setting gives everybody access, but you can change that with each folder. You’ll also have your own folder for personal files.

To get started with your team space:

• Create an initial folder structure (you can always update and add to it later). Team spaces work best when you clearly organize your folders based on the structure of your organization. You might start by adding folders for each sub-team, like “Accounting,” “Sales,” and “Marketing.”
• Add some work files. Get your team started by adding some documents, PDFs, or spreadsheets. Encourage your team leads to pick up where you left off.
• While you’re at it, you might consider organizing your users into groups based on the sub-teams or departments within your organization.

 Configure your team space

2. Communicate with your team

Keeping everyone in the loop is essential for a successful rollout. To make adding team members as easy as possible, we’ve created a few email templates with the most important points. Browse a list of templated messages here, or just create your own.

 Check out the templates

3. Add people to your team

Depending on how big your organization is, you might want to choose a few pilot users to test Dropbox tools before rolling out to the whole team. If you have fewer than 50 employees it's probably okay to get everyone started at once.

You have two options to invite users to your team:

 Enter email addresses through the admin console (simple, and recommended for most teams)

 Use the Active Directory connector or an identity management partner (less common, but useful for companies with lots of integrations already in place)

4. Make Dropbox even easier to use with the desktop app

With the app installed, Dropbox works like any other folder on your computer. Drag and drop (or right-click) files to move them into your Dropbox folder. They’ll automatically upload to Dropbox, and you’ll be able to access them from anywhere using our desktop and mobile apps, or by visiting the Dropbox website.

 Download and install the app for Mac, Windows, or Linux

5. Save hard drive space with Smart Sync

Smart Sync is a Dropbox feature that lets your team see and access every file and folder in their Dropbox, right from their desktop, while taking up practically no hard drive space. It’s the perfect way to reclaim gigabytes of space without changing your team’s workflow. Below, you can choose whether new files automatically download to your team’s computers, or if they start as online-only.

 Review Smart Sync settings

6. Protect your team with extra security settings

While Dropbox follows some of the most widely-accepted encryption and security standards by default, we highly recommend you take these additional steps to keep your team and data as safe as possible.

 Enable two-step verification (2FA) for your whole team

 Set team-wide sharing permissions

 Enable single sign-on (Advanced teams only)

7. Connect Dropbox to your favorite productivity apps

Stay focused on your most important work by connecting Dropbox with the apps you already know and love. Whether you’re using Google, Microsoft, Adobe, Slack, Salesforce, or Atlassian, we’ve likely got an integration so your team can avoid switching between tools and duplicating work. Take a look at the full list of partners, and try connecting at least one third-party app as you get started.

 Connect third-party apps

8. Learn more about Dropbox

There’s a lot more to Dropbox than syncing files and folders. While this guide helps walk you through the most important steps for getting started, you and your team can learn even more with self-guided training courses:

 Attend a training yourself, or check out other quick-start guides

 Invite your team to training

That’s it! With these steps completed, you’re all set up and ready to use Dropbox with your team. Here are a few links if you’d like to check out additional resources:

 Learn more about Dropbox in the help center

 Contact Dropbox Support

 Check if Dropbox is up