Dropbox Partners with PRO TECHnology to Transform Operations at Khaleej Times: How the UAE's First English Daily Moved Its Newsroom onto One Secure Platform

The problem every newsroom recognises

A daily newspaper produces more files in a day than most companies produce in a month: text in three or four drafts, hundreds of photographs from staff and agencies, page layouts, video for the website and social channels, and the graphics that go with them. Before 2024 those files at Khaleej Times lived where they were made: on reporters' laptops, on the picture desk's drives, on a file server that was full, and in email threads with attachments too big to send. Finding last year's photograph of a building meant asking the person who had taken it. A wrong save minutes before the page closed could not be undone. And nobody could say, for certain, who had access to what.

None of this is unusual. It is the normal state of a media organisation that grew up on paper and added digital tools one at a time. The cost shows up as minutes lost every day by every desk, as risk to the archive, and as the security gap that opens every time a large file has to be sent outside.

What changed at Khaleej Times

• One home for everything. Team folders organised by desk and section, so a story, its photographs, its page and its video sit together and can be found by search rather than by memory.
• Large files that just sync. Photographs, page files and video move between reporters, editors and designers through shared folders instead of email attachments; Dropbox accepts single files up to 2 TB through the desktop app.
• Secure sharing outside the building. Agencies, freelancers and contributors receive links with passwords, expiry dates and download controls, and the administrators can see every external share from one dashboard.
• A newsroom that can undo. Version history and file recovery bring back the earlier draft or the deleted folder, for 180 days on Dropbox Business plans and 365 days on Business Plus and Enterprise.
• Control without slowing anyone down. Administrators manage users, devices and permissions from one console, with two-step verification, remote wipe for lost devices and audit logs of who did what.

For a daily publication, minutes matter. The path from a reporter's phone in the field to the published page got shorter, and the archive that the newspaper had built over four decades became something the whole newsroom could search and the administrators could protect.

How PRO TECHnology deploys Dropbox for a newsroom

The licence is the easy part. What makes a deployment work is the order of the work, and it is the same order PRO TECHnology followed at Khaleej Times:

• Map the desks. Who produces what, who needs to see it, and who must never see it. The folder structure and the permission groups come from that map, not from the org chart.
• Move the archive in stages. The legacy file server is copied section by section, the old copy is kept read-only until every desk confirms nothing is missing, and only then is it retired.
• Connect the tools people already use. Editorial and design applications open files straight from the platform; video editors review through Dropbox Replay from inside Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro or DaVinci Resolve.
• Train each desk on its own work. A picture editor and a sub-editor do not need the same session. Short, desk-specific training beats a company-wide lecture.
• Set the rules once. Password policy, two-step verification, external-sharing defaults, device approval and retention are set in the admin console before the first user is invited.
• Support locally. Questions, new joiners, leavers and the occasional recovery are handled by PRO TECHnology in Dubai, in the newsroom's own hours.

What Dropbox brings to a media organisation, in plain words

Dropbox is a cloud file platform: files are stored in Dropbox's data centres, synced to each user's computer, and shared by link or by folder. For a media house the parts that matter are these, and each figure below is Dropbox's own published one.

• Large files. Up to 2 TB per file through the desktop app; Dropbox recommends the desktop app or the API rather than the browser for anything over 375 GB.
• Version history and recovery. 180 days on Dropbox Professional, Essentials, Business and Standard plans; 365 days on Business Plus, Advanced and Enterprise, with add-ons that extend it.
• Security. 256-bit AES encryption for files at rest, SSL and TLS in transit, two-step verification, single sign-on, device management, remote wipe, password-protected links, and SOC 1, 2 and 3 reports.
• Where the data lives. Dropbox stores files in data centres in the United States, with in-region storage in Australia, the European Union, Japan and the United Kingdom for eligible team plans. There is no UAE region, which is a question every regulated organisation should settle before signing.
• Dropbox Replay. Review and approval for video, audio, images, PSD and PDF files up to 150 GB, with frame-accurate comments, live review sessions, version comparison and integrations for Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro, Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve and Avid Pro Tools.
• Dropbox Dash. AI search and answers across Dropbox and more than twenty connected applications, from Gmail and Outlook to Slack, Teams and Google Drive, so a reporter finds the document without remembering where it was saved.
• Dropbox Sign. Contributor agreements, model releases and supplier contracts prepared, sent, signed and tracked without printing.

Who this is for, in the words people use when they call us

• “Our reporters send video from the field over WhatsApp and it arrives compressed.” A shared folder on the phone uploads the original, and the desk sees it as it lands.
• “We have twenty years of photographs on a server nobody dares to switch off.” The staged migration moves the archive and keeps the server read-only until every desk signs it off.
• “Freelancers keep asking for server logins.” They get a link with a password and an expiry date instead, and the administrators can see every one.
• “An editor overwrote the page ten minutes before print.” Version history restores the earlier version; nobody retypes anything.
• “We are a broadcaster and our review rounds take days.” Dropbox Replay puts frame-accurate comments inside the editing application and tracks approvals.
• “We are not a newspaper.” Agencies, production houses, architects, engineering consultancies and law firms have the same problem in different clothes: large files, many hands, tight deadlines and outside parties.

About Khaleej Times, Dropbox and PRO TECHnology

Khaleej Times was founded in Dubai on 16 April 1978 as the first English-language daily in the UAE and remains its longest-running. It stopped its weekend print edition in June 2023 as it moved to digital-first publishing, and in February 2026 it reported a monthly digital reach of 37.2 million across its website and channels. Dropbox is the cloud file platform used by teams worldwide for storage, sharing, review and e-signature. PRO TECHnology was founded in Dubai in 1998; its Enterprise IT division, the group's first, supplies and supports data protection, storage and collaboration platforms for organisations across the UAE, and deploys and supports Dropbox for enterprises, with media houses a particular focus since the platform was introduced to the sector at the Address Montgomerie event in May 2024.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

Khaleej Times facts from its Wikipedia entry and its own site; Dropbox figures from Dropbox's help centre and product pages; the deployment details and the method are PRO TECHnology's own account. No figure for time saved or cost reduced is claimed because none was measured for publication.

• Khaleej Times (Wikipedia): founded 16 April 1978, the UAE's first and longest-running English daily, digital reach
• Khaleej Times
• Dropbox Help: what is the Dropbox file size limit (2 TB; 375 GB browser note)
• Dropbox Help: version history overview (180 and 365 days by plan)
• Dropbox: security (AES 256-bit, SSL/TLS, SOC reports, data centres, in-region storage)
• Dropbox Replay
• Dropbox Dash
• PRO TECHnology: Dropbox Business and Enterprise in the UAE
• PRO TECHnology and Dropbox unveil an enterprise solution for the media sector, Address Montgomerie Dubai, 29 May 2024