Microsoft has entered into a partnership with Dropbox to make Office for prominent Dropbox users. The two competing companies will work together to try to bring more choice into the productivity world.

On Dropbox's app, users will now be able to open Office documents inside the app and edit them. Before, users were only able to view the files in a preview mode and would have to go to Microsoft's official app to change the file.

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On Office, Microsoft is now allowing users to save onto their Dropbox account. Users will be able to link their Dropbox account and store all of their files and folders, instead of having to move them around their desktop or mobile before porting them to Dropbox.

This ease-of-use also comes at a questionable time for Microsoft, who recently announced unlimitedOneDrive cloud storage for all Office 365 subscribers. The new integration of Dropbox into the mix seems like a bad move by Microsoft, one that could lose potential customers.

However, Microsoft's head of Office Engineering, Kirk Konigbauer, claims that offering choice is better than having one system users have to use. The same sentiment has been echoed by CEO Satya Nadella, who wants Microsoft to become platform agnostic and open to partnerships when possible.

Dropbox essentially gets free integration with Office 365, a service hundreds of millions of users work on everyday. Having its cloud service integrated could open up customers in the business sector for Dropbox, who previously would have gone with a verified Microsoft solution.

OneDrive is still a much better deal than Dropbox Pro, considering for $10 users get 1TB of storage on Dropbox, but with a $9.99 Office 365 membership, they get unlimited storage, the best productivity suite and even more goodies from Microsoft.

Partnering with Dropbox might show Microsoft is willing to accept choice, but that doesn't mean it is letting Dropbox get a free pass in the cloud storage world. Microsoft and Dropbox will update its mobile app in the next week, desktop versions will be updated by June 2015, around the same time Office for Mac is set to arrive. 

Tags Office 365, Dropbox, OneDrive, cloud storage service, Satya Nadella