Box - A cloud storage & collaboration service

Box - A cloud storage & collaboration service

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Box Inc. (formerly Box.net) is a company best known for its online file sharing and personal cloud content management services for small, midsize businesses and large enterprises. This cloud platform helps you to securely store, share and manage all your files. Whether you need to secure confidential business information, develop a custom mobile application or simplify paper-based office processes, Box can help you do more with your content. You can access your content anywhere you might need it: web, tablet or phone. Plus, you can share large files with a simple link and work on projects with your friends, family or colleagues from anywhere. Although the main focus of the company is to provide services to Businesses/Enterprises but it offers 3 account types:

  • Enterprise - offers endless storage, custom branding and administrative controls. 
  • Business - offers 1TB  storage and the pricing is pretty reasonable for business cloud backup.
  • Personal -  a freemium business model, provides to 10 GB of free storage, is upgrade-able(100GB). 

Box offers an endless list of sharing and privacy features were built specifically for business and IT users. Unlike the basic cloud storage setup, where you can store just about any kind of file, Box lets you share files with colleagues, assign tasks, leave comments on someone's work, and get notifications when a file changes. You can password-protect files and folders that you need to share with team members or clients. You can also set expiration dates for shared files and folders, all passwords can be reset if required, in order to maintain security. You can set the level of access for different users too, like who can see a file and who can't, who can edit and upload documents, this is very easy to designate.

Box is a great choice because it comes with so many tools for collaboration and file privacy control. Other systems, such as Google apps, NetSuite and Salesforce can be integrated with Box, so that you can easily save documents to Box. There are also plug-ins for Microsoft Office and Adobe Lightroom that let you open and edit files saved to Box from those applications.

Like other cloud storage services, you can download a desktop app and sync your files between your hard drive and the cloud.  A mobile version of the service is available for Android, BlackBerry, iOS, WebOS, and Windows Phone devices.