Box already made news earlier today with the launch of OneCloud, its suite of productivity applications that are accessible from mobile devices. But it wasn’t done — the company also hosted the last stop of its World Tour in San Francisco, where CEO Aaron Levie demonstrated what he described as a “reinvention” of collaboration on Box.
These features fall under the umbrella of what Box is calling its Social Workflow. He argued that while there are plenty of social business tools, these innovations haven’t made their way into document management systems, which he said are “stuck in time and not being updated to move to this post-PC era.” The goal is to bring some of the innovations from social network into Box, and also to make the collaboration process work better on smartphones and tablets.
The Social Workflow involves four main features. First, you can create tasks and track their progress. Second, you can call for the attention of a specific teammate using the ubiquitous “@” symbol. Third, you can now leave comments via email. And fourth, you can now edit content.
After Levie hyped up the new features, Box employees demonstrated them on-stage. They opened a document, looked at the comment thread under the document, then rather than leaving another comment, they created a task in the thread and assigned it to someone else. They also viewed the comment thread over email and sent a response (which makes it easier to contribute from a smartphone). And they showed off an Edit Mode for Box, where they could open Adobe Photoshop (or whatever software was used to create the document) directly from Box, edit a photo, save the changes, and have those changes upload directly to Box.
After starting as a college business project in 2005, Box was officially launched in March of 2006 with the vision of connecting people, devices and networks. Box provides more than 8 million users with secure cloud content management and collaboration. They say their platform “allows personal and commercial content to be accessible, sharable, and storable in any format from anywhere”.
Aaron Levie co-founded Box with friend and Box CFO Dylan Smith in 2005. The Box mission is to provide businesses and individuals with the simplest solution to share, access and manage their information. Aaron is the visionary behind Box’s product and platform strategy, which is focused on incorporating the best of traditional content management with an easy to use user experience suited to the way people collaborate and work today. Box is one of the fastest growing companies in...
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