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 stay organized, collaborate more easily, and keep all their data safe.
As an admin, you can easily add or remove team members, monitor sharing activity, and protect company 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.
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.
Did you know?
If a member of your team used their work email address to create a separate Dropbox account, they can migrate that account to your Dropbox business team.
3. Add people to your team
Depending on how big your company 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.
Did you know?
Dropbox Business team members can "pair" a personal and work account, meaning they can access both accounts from the same device.
You can help members of your team connect or disconnect a personal account.
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.
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)
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Did you know?
You can use Dropbox Business to migrate company data from a server to Dropbox.
7. Connect Dropbox to your favorite productivity apps
Minimize interruptions in your workflow 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.
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
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:
