Leader becomes first distie to market new Dropbox search tool in Australia

Leader Computers has been named as the first distributor to market Dropbox’s new cross-platform search tool, Dropbox Dash, rolling out enablement sessions nationwide and working closely with Dropbox to educate resellers on best practices and use cases. 

The tool allows customers to search for files across all of their Dropbox-connected cloud applications and repositories to find information relevant to a particular task.

Dropbox Asia Pacific sales head Luke Simmons told techpartner.news that the tool is able to “extract value” from existing content by understanding team context, workflows and file relationships.

"It also has universal search, so can search across all of your connected platforms - Slack Teams, Canva etc - so rather than going into each of those different silos to find the information that you're looking for, it just brings it to the surface,” he said.

Training the trainers

Dropbox rolled out an Early Adopter Program for the tool, which sees the company training partners and also distributors, who are then able to train partners as well, and those partners can then go on to train their customers.

Leader’s cloud business manager Hahn Tran said with so many AI tools out there, the partner needs to know how to use that technology.

"People think that AI is just a chatbot, but AI is more than that," he said.

“Showing them what are the possibilities, allowing them to then go out to their customers and show the use cases ... that's where that 'train the trainer' model works and we've seen success through that."

Simmons added that Dropbox's channel team will assist hand in hand on deals with the partners.

“If partners are going to go on a new adventure with AI, they want someone guiding them along that understands the product and gives them support; they don't want to just buy off a website and roll it out and hope for the best,” he told techpartner.news.

Leader will offer resale of the licencing for Dropbox Dash, but Tran also expressed a desire to work with partners as a ‘service layer’ - for the company to go out with partners to deploy this solution.

He said that Leader’s AI use had doubled since they started using Dropbox Dash internally, sharing one use case where salespeople can quickly gather information about a prospect ahead of a meeting.

“Another use case that our team uses, and I've started to see partners use it as well, is [writing] proposals using the company tone of voice,” he explained.

“You don't want proposals or emails to go out with different tones of voice, so you're able to use that feature within Dash to be able to do this.”

Privacy measures in place

Simmons added that the tool had privacy measures in place to prevent some of the more unexpected risks that can come from large language models accessing a broad database of files.

“You can only see the information that you had permissions to that day - you don't get any more permissions than what you had before,” he said.

“If you could access certain team folders and permissions, and you're already sharing documents with other people, that's restricted to what you can now see in Dash.”

Another feature within Dropbox Dash called Protect and Control takes all the data the tool has ingested, looks at the public links and how the information's already been shared.

“You can take control of that, run reports on it and see what information is actually shared,” he said.

“That gives IT teams a much greater level of governance over that Dash portfolio and all of their cloud portfolio to be able to see where that goes and then take remediation steps if they need to, so that’s an additional layer of visibility customers get too.”