Overall, the data contained roughly 400,000 unique users working on about 500,000 separate projects. We also had reliable data on seniority levels of users, such as whether they were senior or junior faculty.

What we did see was anonymized data on every shared Dropbox folder associated with a given researcher, along with whom they’d shared the folder with, how often the folder was accessed by anyone associated with it, the duration of collaboration on a project, and how users split their time among different projects represented by the folders - a wide variety of specific touchpoints. This included information on a user’s total number of shared folders, folder structure, and shared folder access, but we and Dropbox employees could view no personally identifiable information. To address this question, we studied the virtual interactions of research teams at universities around the word on Dropbox, analyzed how the collaborative dynamics related to performance and developed a list of best practices that organizations can use on any file-sharing platform to improve team performance.ĭropbox gave us access to project-folder-related data, which Dropbox had aggregated and anonymized, for all the scientists using its platform over the period from May 2015 to May 2017 - a group that represented 1,000 university departments (from the top 100 universities and their Dropbox collaborators from other anonymized universities of any rank). As more and more collaboration happens in digital settings, it’s critical to understand best practices for working in such spaces. But less is known about how groups work together virtually.

We know a lot about how teams collaborate face-to-face, with regard to leadership, communication, conflict resolution, and other areas. Whether working on cancer cures or the latest consumer-tech products, how teams collaborate affects their performance and success. But is your team using such collaborative platforms as effectively as they could be? The use of virtual file-sharing platforms like Dropbox, Google Docs, and others has become ubiquitous in business, academic, and other settings.

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