Box.net Adds New Online Text Editor

By Jason Harris | Published Mar 11, 2009

Online storage options are numerous and plentiful. If you want to store your files in the cloud, you have many options that are very inexpensive and highly-useful. Box.Net, an established player in the cloud-based storage market, recently released a feature to help further differentiate themselves from the competition.

With a new user interface called Web Documents, Box.net users can now create and edit documents directly on the Box.net website.

Before this announcement, users would have to create a document on their local computer and upload it into their Box.net storage space. However, with Web Documents, users can now create documents in Box using a standard document editor.

Users have the ability enter text, format it and even edit HTML code, if they wish. Photos can be implemented into a document via upload from your computer or by specifying a URL to an existing image on the website.

As Web Worker Daily stated, don't think of Box.Net's Web Document as a replacement for Microsoft Word, rather an online replacement for a utility such as WordPad on Windows or TextEdit on Apple's OS X.

Sharing Is Fun

To encourage document sharing, any Web Document created in the wiki-style editor is shared with everyone already collaborating inside the containing folder — no additional configuration.

After a Web Document is created inside an existing folder, the document creator can specify more granular permissions such as who can view and/or edit the document.

Box.Net Web Documents

Unlike Google Docs or Zoho Writer, two users cannot simultaneously edit a Web Document. Box does, however, include basic document versioning, allowing users to save and roll back to a prior version in case a mistake was made.

Furthering Differentiating Themselves

After recently adding capabilities to Box.net that add more social features to their online storage service, including activity streams and twitter-like messaging, it's great to see the company further responding to customer feedback by implementing this small but very useful feature.

Learn more about Box.Net Web Documents or just get started creating your own.