Box, Dropbox, Google G-Drive and other storage services can be assigned as Office 365 Places. Firms will have selected these systems over Microsoft’s own storage for many reasons. One is that they have better support for non-Microsoft products such as Salesforce, Slack, Apple products and Linux. Graph does not map third-party Places. In some cases, audit logs and file histories may be maintained longer with non-Microsoft data stores.

Box says policies can be set to prompt users to send content via a secure Box link rather than an email attachment. Microsoft Office documents and more than 120 different file types can be previewed natively in the browser. Beyond Office 365, Box has other third-party integrations, for example it can act as the content layer for Salesforce and Slack.

Dropbox plus Office 365 is better than the sum of the parts, according to Dropbox, which also says it has thousands of integrations built into its platform. These include other productivity tools from Slack, Salesforce and Adobe and security products from Okta, Symantec, MobileIron and Microsoft Cloud App Security (based on the 2015 acquisition of Adallom, which was already a Dropbox partner).