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Dropbox Business has announced several updates for administrators as part of the firm’s AdminX initiative to make it easier for IT staff to manage how the service is used.

The AdminX programme was announced in July and has now been given its second update. The most notable new feature is the ability for Dropbox Enterprise customers to block staff using Dropbox for personal use while still allowing corporate use by controlling which services are accessible from a network.

Dropbox has partnered with networking firms Barracuda Networks, Netskope, Skyhigh Networks and Symantec to help fit with customer requirements. More will be added in due course.

Jeroen Roodnat, solutions architect lead at Dropbox Business, told V3 that working with partners like this will ensure that customers’ existing kit works with the new services.

“We are letting customers that have already deployed these pieces of infrastructure deploy them to Dropbox Enterprise, and we really believe that having this partnership set-up is the way forward,” he said.

Secondly, the firm has introduced subdomain verification so that admins can deploy Dropbox to specific groups based on more granular access levels than the initial domain verification introduced in July.

As promised in July, AdminX now features the ability to manage device approvals so that only those devices, such as smartphones and laptops, that staff have allowed to access Dropbox-stored data can do so.

Enhanced audit logs will become available in the coming weeks to provide insights into how staff use documents, and to track any changes from file creation to deletion and everything in between.

Dropbox Business has also announced that the Paper service, which remains in open beta, can be managed through the AdminX service as the firm reacts to its huge success.

“We’ve seen over a million documents created since we launched Paper and it’s having a huge impact with business customers, so we are now adding AdminX controls to Paper for Dropbox Business,” said Roodnat.

The controls include the ability to delete users, stop mobile devices accessing the service, set deletion privileges to other users, and limit sharing to stop documents being sent to those outside the company.

Finally, as part of a programme to move the Dropbox service from AWS back to its own infrastructure, the firm has added 11 new points of presence to help customers get data to its network faster.

The new locations are California, Washington, Texas, Virginia, New York, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong.

“By bringing the traffic to our network as soon as possible we can control the experience customers have by ensuring we have the right connections, the right latency and so on,” said Roodnat.

Article source – http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2477229/dropbox-boosts-adminx-controls-and-expands-network-point-of-presence