Box.net News & Articles

There’s been a number of releases this week that help document management, including one from OpenText that helps document governance in SharePoint 2010, a connector from Box to your ECMs, KnowledgeLake has released document imaging for SharePoint, while ABBYY’s SDK integrates data capture with third-party applications.

Info360 has been a whirlwind experience, full of engaging and enlightening discussions with those impacting the enterprise with new tools and technologies. From innovative ways to connect communities, share and secure documents, project manage seamlessly, improve mobility and capture lots of data to improve business processes, there are so many ways the enterprise can become powerful by employing simple tools. Here is a quick snapshot of the vendors that we met and what they bring to the enterprise table.

Box.net (news, site) has come a long way in the last couple of years, from a small little known cloud-based document storage and collaboration provider to a potential contender in the content management arena. And like every other contender, it's not enough to simply offer your wares, you have to play nice with the others.

Conference season is in full swing. While South By Southwest has dominated the news for a while, next week brings info360. Formally known as the AIIM International Conference and Expo, info360 will come to Washington, DC, and with it bring together thousands of business and IT professionals to learn about the changing and emerging technologies and their place in helping the enterprise drive business processes, collaboration, knowledge sharing and decision making. We’ll be covering it live and already our schedules are full of meetings and can’t-miss events.

The explosion of content, media and cloud computing has had an irreversible impact on consumer behavior and expectations. In an Enterprise CMS context, the resulting shifts in shape and structure are the beginnings of a new environment for managing data. Unfortunately for traditional systems -- cough, SharePoint, cough -- this territory comes with a set of rules that may be a bit difficult to adjust to.

A rash of investment deals have taken place in the last few days, throwing funding at web companies that venture capitalists think will make it big in the near future.

We preach about the importance of planning in almost every article concerning preparation for the future of the collaborative enterprise, but this week we're considering just the opposite: not having an in-depth strategy is a strategy in and of itself. 

If Microsoft and SharePoint have been laughing off Box.net’s claims to be the rightful challenger as a business collaboration platform, they’re probably not laughing now after Box.net announced a new round of capital funding of US$ 48 million that will be spent on doubling its 140+ staff, expanding its data centers outside the US and building its mobile applications.

Security is often the foremost concern in using any enterprise application. With these considerations, Box.net (news, site) has updated its iPhone and iPad applications to add enterprise-grade security to Box.net's mobile content management tools.

Workflow and multiple users are the cause of much misery for those trying to keep files up to date in the cloud, but ShareFile offers a way for SMBs to handle this tricky juggling act.

There are two things we always seem to want from our applications these days: simplicity and ways to interact with our colleagues. Today, Box.net (news, site) unveils a new version of their cloud content management solution that offers both.

We’ve been talking about cloud deployment a lot this week so it’s appropriate that we finish up with an example of how rapid this market is developing. According to figures released by cloud content management vendor Box.net, the company now has 5 million users with enterprise revenues more than tripling over the course of the year.

Sometimes, with all the fireworks surrounding Microsoft vs Google for dominance of the business cloud market, we forget that there are indeed other players. KnowledgeTree, another competitor, continues to build its cloud offering for the SMB sector with this week’s new release offering Office integration and new pricing levels that drop as low as US$ 35/month.

Another busy week in the world of Document Management. With Windows Phone 7 offering email archiving by LiveOffice and Open Text and Oracle getting together for large volume email capture amongst other things, email has been the theme of the week. In other news, EntropySoft releases a SAP connector, while Box.net gets electronic signature.

Thanks to some storage efficiency improvements, Box.net (news, site) is benefiting from some economies of scale. Of course it wouldn't be fair not to share some of that good fortune, so Box has decided to pass it on to you.