Box.net gets more social with latest upgrade

Box.net, the online storage and collaboration platform made some moves this week that will push it further toward its goal of becoming a full-service, cloud-based content management vendor. The latest, which the company says is the beginning of a string of upcoming changes, concentrates on surfacing information through social collaboration.

This week's update includes an enhancement to Box's existing "Updates Stream," which it referred to as, up until now, "a glorified RSS Reader." The new interface changes that. 

"We've redesigned our newsfeed with a slick new UI that promotes engagement directly from the feed. The activity types have been expanded to show when a collaborator joins a folder or adds an OpenBox application. And to connect users with the right information faster, there are now more than 10 activity type filters that can be applied to the feed," said Box.

Box hopes to offer sophisticated functionality while avoiding the pitfalls that fell Google Wave and, it believes, plague SharePoint 2010. How do you add functionality and avoid bloatware? It's a tough line to walk, but Box.net CEO Aaron Levie (whom we interviewed One on One) believes it has to do with a cloud implementation versus one promoted through IT and reducing complexity in the interface.

"We have a very different philosophy than SharePoint," Levie says. "They've built their products with large enterprises in mind, designing around very complex, specific needs, and leaning heavily on large IT departments and third party consultants to handle deployment and maintenance. At Box, we're focusing on end-user experience and bringing cloud content management to the masses, with an elastic, web-based solution that's simple enough for a small business without a an IT department, but powerful enough to address the massive information and collaboration challenges of our Fortune 500 customers."

Cloud by its nature doesn't involve large installations, so Box.net will always have that advantage over installed software, but the question is how does Box's social integration differ from other ECM vendor approaches over the last couple of years? "At Box, we're building a social intelligence layer that is designed to make work easier--not more complicated--for the end user. The newsfeed is the first step, leveraging the real-time power of the web to surface relevant content, collaboration and conversations to the right people as they occur."

Box also intends to use its open platform and APIs to work with other Enterprise 2.0 vendors including SharePoint--which, like every other vendor, Box has to find a way to work with in the enterprise.

Levie acknowledges this. "Especially in large enterprises, there are a lot of possibilities for integration between Box and SharePoint--organizations with existing SharePoint deployments might need a quick, easy way to share information across teams or with external collaborators without placing a burden on the IT department," Levie says. He adds, "Many of our existing customers have deployed Box in conjunction with SharePoint, and we'll look for ways to make this experience more seamless."

Box.net continues to push toward becoming a cloud content management solution and today's announcement is another step in that direction.

For more information:
- see The Box.net press release

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