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06.03.09 Box.net Begining To Flesh Out Their Social Side  By Bill Ives Box.net began in 2005 to provide a way for people to store content on the web and access it from anywhere. Its capabilities have continued to expand along with the maturity of the enterprise 2.0 concept. Last week I spoke with Jen Grant, Amy White, and Sean Lindo from Box.net about their new features. They have moved the business from its initial vision of online storage for the consumer market as their business users have found the service useful and expressed demands for new capabilities. Jen said they see three main use cases at the moment. First, people in such areas as a firm?s marketing department, need to store and share large files. For example, Stonewall Kitchen provides visual images to its outlets and partners to use in promotions. They offer access to these large files through Box.net. Second, some companies do not want to maintain file servers and go paperless. They put all the company files on Box.net with access permission levels to accomplish this objective and provide ease of access. This includes images, audio, video and creative assets, as well as more traditional documents such was Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Third, companies are now going beyond simple storage and access to use Box.net for team collaboration. This third area is the most complex and it has been the focus of their new feature development. They see this as a major growth opportunity and I would agree. Box.net's main goal is providing a cloud solution that is both easy to implement and easy to use. They are using this strategy to address the enterprise 2.0 adoption issues and I agree here, as well. They have also found that teams have gone beyond team collaboration to use Box.net for lightweight project management within the workflow. Much of teamwork within many companies is content centric so Box.net wants to provide collaboration and project management capabilities where the content resides. They have seen good pickup here. Box.net also support social networking in the context of content. You can see content related profiles, discussions, tags, and comments. However, in keeping with the simplicity goal, these features are offered in a side bar so they do not clutter up the workspace. There were also options for each content folder such as share, comment, and star (make it a favorite).
A page listing a collection of content files displayed a number of features off to the side such as a listing of the collaborators, recently updated files, latest comments and folder options. You can add to content such things as bookmarks, a related website link, description, and comments. You can also see the latest activity across all shared content. Here is sample page containing folders. Continue reading this article. About the Author: Dr. Bill Ives is an independent consultant and writer who has worked with Fortune 100 companies in business uses of emerging technologies for over 20 years. For several years he led the Knowledge Management Practice for a large consulting firm.. Now he primarily helps companies with their business blogs. He is also the VP of Social Media and blogger for TVissimo, a new TV schedule search engine. Prior to consulting, Dr. Ives was a Research Associate at Harvard University exploring the effects of media on cognition. He obtained his Ph. D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Toronto. Bill can be reached at his blog: Portals and KM. He also writes for the FastForward blog and the AppGap blog. |
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