Desktop-based email clients aren’t exactly a hot topic these days, but millions of users still rely on their trusty Outlook client. To bridge the gap between Outlook on the desktop and the web, the popular online content-sharing and management service Box has long offered an add-on that allows Outlook users to use Box for managing email attachments. Until today, this add-on was only available for paying Business and Enterprise customers, but starting now, even users with free Box accounts can install this plugin.
Using Box instead of traditional email attachments, the company argues, allows users to ensure that the size of an attachment is “no longer an issue since you can replace them with shared links to Box.” In addition, using Box allows users to manage permissions and track who has accessed a file. All of this, Box says, happens inside the native Outlook experience and the system will ask users if they want to use Box whenever they attach a document to an email directly.
Users can also convert existing attachments and those they get from other users into shared links on Box.
In addition to making the product available to all users, the add-on is now also available in a number of new languages, including German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish and Chinese.
Here is what using the plugin looks like: