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Office 365 Co-authoring on MacOS and Windows. How to avoid conflicted files?

Hello,

We are a team of 7 people using a Dropbox account for our business, with centralised admin.

We have four people using Microsoft Office on a Mac and 2 people (the joint CEOs) using Microsoft Office on a Windows Laptop.

We're constantly having conflicted file issues and I need some help to understand the best way to setup the Office integration features that are available from Dropbox.

I've found conflicting articles this morning - one has instructions for 'adding Dropbox as a place on Microsoft apps' that includes both Windows and Mac, and another says it can only be done on a Windows laptop.

Can you please direct me to the latest and greatest instructions for Mac users and Windows users to setup co-authoring with Office 365 through Dropbox?

Cheers

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Accepted answers

andrewkol

This is now resolved. For those of you looking for a solution, I did the following on my mac to get this going:

I found the setting in the Admin console that let me turn on the "Dropbox folder updates" setting. After doing that, I immediately quit the Dropbox app and re-opened it an hour later. When I re-opened the app, the "you are not eligible' message under Dropbox > Preferences > Sync > Dropbox folder updates was gone, and there was now a button allowing me to move across to 'File Provider' for Mac, which is needed to enable co-authoring on Office documents. I went through that process and let it do it's thing in the background.
Next, I added 'Dropbox for Teams' as a location in Microsoft 365. I opened Word, went to File > Open > Online Locations > Manage Storage Accounts > Add Storage Accounts > Dropbox for Teams and followed the login prompts. Previously when I tried to do this, my existing account was not recognised and the login process tried to sign me up with a new account, but this time it was working as expected.
Once Dropbox was added as a Storage account, I opened a Word doc from Finder and could see that the 'Auto Save' toggle in the top left of the document was now turned on, and other colleagues who had completed Steps 1 and 2 were able to co-author the document with me.

It's worth noting that moving across to 'File Provider' moves everything to 'online only' by default, so files are technically no longer available offline, which is great for your hardrive, and there doesn't seem to be much of a lag when you open an 'online' file from 'Finder'. There is an option to move back to an online/offline setup but I haven't investigated that closely yet.

All comments

Walter

Hey @andrewkol - thanks for posting on our Community again!

Could you clarify if you're referring to the feature outlined here or if you had something else in mind? Did you follow these steps by the way?

When it comes to conflicted copies, are you familiar with this resource at all?

Let us know more and we'll take it from there, Andrew.

andrewkol

I think the best next step would be for you to tell me what features to enable that will give us the outcome that we need. Currently, each of our 7 staff (2 using Windows and 5 using Mac) have access to our dropbox through Explorer on Windows or Finder on Mac. We all use 'selective sync' so that only files we need on a daily basis are taking up space on our hard drive.

From here, what we need to work out is how to get the following in place:

When a file is opened from Finder or Explorer using a Microsoft Office desktop app on either a Mac device or PC device, the file will autosave and can be co-authored by anyone else in the team. Currently, we have to save and close a file before someone else can edit it.
When a file is opened in a web browser, it can easily be edited using Microsoft 365 online apps.

I'm a Dropbox admin for our business and can see that we have app permissions enabled for the team for Microsoft Office.

I can also see from Dropbox > Preferences > Sync under "Dropbox Folder updates" displays the following message - "you are not eligible for the new Dropbox for macOS on File Provider at this time. Your team administrator has not enabled File Provider".

I also had a look at adding Dropbox as an 'online location' from an Office 365 app, which is under File > Open > Online Locations > Manage Storage Accounts and under 'Add an Account' clicked 'Dropbox for teams', however the Dropbox login screen that appears under 'Log in or sign up to Dropbox to link with Office 365' does not recognise my Dropbox account email address and asks me to sign up.

What should we do next?

Cheers

Hannah

Hey @andrewkol, I hope it's okay for me to jump in.

You mentioned you're using selective sync, but I just wanted to clarify if you're referring to the feature that allows you to remove entire folders from your Dropbox folder or the feature that helps you make your files online-only.

Also, can you take a look at the Dropbox badge feature? Perhaps it'll help with what you're trying to achieve.

Just keep in mind that it only works if you're editing files using the Dropbox desktop app, not the website.

andrewkol

Hi Hannah,

Selective sync is not really relevant to the question. I was being clear about our setup, where we have majority of our online Dropbox files syncing to our laptops, but we 'unselect' any folders that are of a significant size so that those folders don't take up space on our hard drives.

I've just found the Admin setting for enabling File Provider, and have enabled it. This will hopefully move the current message, under 'Dropbox folder updates' that says "You are not eligible for the new Dropbox for macOS on File Provider at this time. Your team administrator has not enabled File Provider".

Once that is up and running, it should allow our Mac users to co-author documents in Microsoft apps, right?

andrewkol

This is now resolved. For those of you looking for a solution, I did the following on my mac to get this going:

I found the setting in the Admin console that let me turn on the "Dropbox folder updates" setting. After doing that, I immediately quit the Dropbox app and re-opened it an hour later. When I re-opened the app, the "you are not eligible' message under Dropbox > Preferences > Sync > Dropbox folder updates was gone, and there was now a button allowing me to move across to 'File Provider' for Mac, which is needed to enable co-authoring on Office documents. I went through that process and let it do it's thing in the background.
Next, I added 'Dropbox for Teams' as a location in Microsoft 365. I opened Word, went to File > Open > Online Locations > Manage Storage Accounts > Add Storage Accounts > Dropbox for Teams and followed the login prompts. Previously when I tried to do this, my existing account was not recognised and the login process tried to sign me up with a new account, but this time it was working as expected.
Once Dropbox was added as a Storage account, I opened a Word doc from Finder and could see that the 'Auto Save' toggle in the top left of the document was now turned on, and other colleagues who had completed Steps 1 and 2 were able to co-author the document with me.

Theresa

Hi there @andrewkol ,

I’m so glad to hear you successfully got your Office 365 files synchronised across both Mac and Windows OS with Dropbox 🙌. Thank you so much for coming back to the Community to share how you resolved the issue, complete with detailed step-by-step instructions. It’s contributions like yours that keep the Community spirit alive and thriving 🤗.

By the way, I’m Theresa, a Community Manager here at Dropbox HQ 👩‍💻. If you’re open to sharing, I’d love to hear more about how you use Dropbox in your daily routine and which features you find most helpful.

Also, just as an FYI, we have some dedicated spaces here in the Community. Feel free to take a look around and jump into any conversations that catch your interest 😉.

Thanks again for being such a valuable part of the Community 😀!

Theresa 😺 (Dropbox Community Manager)