Dropbox began as a consumer-focused service, but as anyone who works with digital files knows, it has been adopted by businesses — both large and small — en masse. After dabbling with business-focused features for a while, Dropbox is now officially launching Dropbox for Business, with tools designed to make the service as convenient as possible for IT managers.

Dropbox for Business is really the rechristened Dropbox for Teams, which the company launched back in 2011. That service costs $795 a year for 1TB of storage and includes live support as well as many team-management tools. With Dropbox for Business, the service is getting single sign-on (SSO).

With SSO, IT managers will be able to let their company's employees sign into Dropbox with the same login info they use for all company services. It also means easier management of those with access to Dropbox folders, since SSO will be tied to active directory integration. If a company deletes someone from their main directory, that change will automatically be reflected in Dropbox.

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"Opportunities have opened up to work with larger and larger businesses," says Dropbox vice president of business development Sujay Jaswa. "Based on our conversations with these customers, the most requested feature was single sign-on."

For the new service, Dropbox has partnered with several sign-on identity providers, namely Ping Identity, Okta, OneLogin, Centrify and Symplified. Dropbox's SSO uses Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), an industry standard.

"Most businesses tend to already have an existing identity provider," says Dropbox for Business manager Anand Subramani. "From the admin perspective, if you set this up correctly, the user may actually never even have to log into Dropbox. We can securely pass your credentials from your PC to Dropbox."

Besides adding an IT-friendly feature (at no extra cost), Dropbox for Business also represents the company unquestionably entering the enterprise market, going head-to-head with others in the space such as Box.net.

"SSO using SAML is clearly an enterprise feature," says Jaswa. "But our customers now range all the way from small businesses to divisions of large companies, and several large companies are talking to us about much larger deployments, and we wanted to come up a name that adequately reflected our customer base."

Will your business consider using Dropbox now that it has single sign-on? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy of Dropbox

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