Summer’s going by fast and it’s already that time of year again - time to gather with family and friends, get the grills going, see some fireworks…and depending on what state you live in, set off a few of your own. Of course, it’s good to take a few moments to remember what this holiday’s all about.



We got an early start on the celebration with a picnic this week, courtesy of the official Box Fun Committee (yes, that’s the name). We had plenty of good food on hand, some laughs and some friendly competition - tug o’ war (the engineering team triumphed), a huge egg toss and some frisbee and football thrown in. A pinata was involved too. We also took some nice group photos with everyone sporting the fun t-shirts we created for our Box vs. SharePoint Challenge.

Good times… Till next week, we wish everyone a fun and safe weekend - and to our international friends, have a great weekend too!

Post by Sean Lindo, Community Manager

Since Box.net’s beginnings in 2005, we’ve been driven by a set of core values and have worked especially hard to stay true to one in particular: Sharing should be simple.

In fact, it’s a simple concept. Yet many companies still offer collaboration software that miss the mark in keeping it easy for you, the user. We’ve heard everything from permission issues, to browser incompatibility, to small things that unnecessarily require an IT admin to step in, so we thought it was time to take a stand for simplicity.



One service in particular, and coincidentally the largest, is Microsoft SharePoint. We hear from SharePoint users, integrators, resellers and administrators alike that when it comes to flexible group collaboration and sharing, SharePoint is just not working for them.

We want to make sure that people know there are alternatives to SharePoint, so we’re issuing a challenge. Check out Box and see for yourself how easy it is to share files both inside and outside of your company. If you don’t think Box is easier to use, after a free 14-day trial, we’ll provide you three months of SharePoint for free. Yes, you read that correctly. We believe in our product so much that we’ll get you on SharePoint if we’re wrong.

Check out http://www.box.net/simple to find out more about our challenge. We’re giving away some fun t-shirts for people that want to help spread the word. Just tweet your SharePoint stories with #SharePointBlues. If you already use Box, you can help spread the word too - especially to any of your SharePoint-using friends! We’d like everyone’s help in this campaign.

And yes, that’s a real billboard on 101 in California.

- Aaron

P.S. If you’re a SharePoint MVP, partner or consultant, we want to talk to you as well. While SharePoint might be appropriate in some circumstances, we’re sure you have clients that would benefit from a simpler way to manage content. If nothing else, we value your opinion and hope you’ll join this conversation. We’re all looking to make it easier for people in businesses to share content and increase their productivity.

Hello Boxers!

Now that the bug safari is over, our developers have once again put on their wizard caps to work on new features, as well as enhance some existing ones.  I’d like to highlight a couple for this post, including the option to view a full-sized gallery version of your images and the ability for folder, file or discussion owners to delete comments made by other users.

Full-size image gallery
I hear from a lot of customers regarding our photo-related features, so I’m sure many of you will appreciate the fact that you can now preview a full-sized gallery version of all images under 5MB in size, although we plan on increasing that limit in the future.

To use this feature, simply click on an image-GIF, JPG or PNG-under 5MB in size, which will take you to preview mode.  From here, you can click on ‘Full Size’, which you’ll find on the upper left-hand side of the image to display the gallery view.

Moderating discussions and comments
If you use Box’s discussion and commenting features, you may have noticed that users who left a given comment were the only ones who could delete them.  We have added a little more control to this feature, which now allows all discussion, file or folder owners to delete comments made by other users. In addition, users can now edit their own comments.

To delete a comment made on your discussions, folders or files, just click on the ‘X’ associated with the comment. To edit a comment, select ‘Edit’ shown at the end of your comment.

Well, that’s all for now. Keep reading the blog to stay up-to-date on the latest and greatest in Box. Till next time, happy Boxing!

Post by Amber Nguyen, Support Supervisor

I love podcasts - I’ve been listening to them for years now. Whatever your interests are, there’s a podcast for it. I’m a huge tech and gadget geek, so podcasts like TWiT (several of them), Engadget, iPhone Alley, Cranky Geeks, DL.TV, Tekzilla and ones from the Smartphone Experts regularly occupy my iPhone. Like others that hopped on the podcasting bandwagon long ago, I listen to podcasts as much as - if not more than - music. So it’s a particular honor of mine to tell you that we’re working on launching a Box.net podcast very soon.

When I took on this project, I began to realize more and more just how good my favorite podcasters are. They make it sound so effortless and they do a great job of entertaining people week in, week out - and for most of them, this isn’t their day job. Doing a podcast, if you want it to be good and sustainable, is a huge undertaking. It’s figuring out what you want a podcast to be, what you want to talk about, looking ahead as far out as you can, buying equipment and learning new applications, among many, many other things.

But as time went on, it’s really become a labor of love. I got some great advice from people like Dieter Bohn who does the Phone different and PalmCast podcasts and Tekzilla’s Veronica Belmont, who’s one of the biggest names in the tech world (thanks Dieter and Veronica!). I even listened to a podcast about podcasting. Together, I think the best advice I got is just to dive in and do it. You can’t worry about being great the first time out - people who have been podcasting for a while always say that your first podcast isn’t going to be great because you’re going to get better as you move on.

And soon, you’ll be able to check out the results. I just wanted to give all of you a heads up because I’m counting on your help to make the Box.net Podcast something you’re going to enjoy and something you want to get involved with - we need you! Whether it’s submitting topics and questions you want us to cover, telling us your Box story or even joining us for a podcast, we want you to be a part of it. Plus we all know how boring it gets to have someone just talking at you all the time. I want you to be part of the conversation.

If you want to get involved, feel free to email me at Sean [at] Box.net or send a tweet @boxdotnet.

Stay tuned!

Post by Sean Lindo, Community Manager

Safari is defined as “a journey or expedition for hunting, exploration or investigation” - it’s also a great alternative to Firefox, especially for Mac users. All kidding aside, the Box.net Development team recently went on a safari of its own, hunting, exploring and investigating bugs that needed to be banished from your world of Box.

After launching a host of new features in recent months, Box developers took about a week to suspend work on big features and enhancements to take on bugs - not any “showstopper” bugs (which get fixed ASAP, whenever they occur), but small glitches that needed to be taken care of but weren’t high-priority fixes. As our Director of Engineering Steven Black said, it was a time for our developers to finally take that “if I only had a little bit of time I could fix that” moment.

The Bug Safari was a success and the development team was able to fix some long-standing issues that - yes, I will say it - bugged us for a while. According to Steven, our team was able to make a severe dent in what they call the “Bug Load,” which should provide smooth sailing for our development team and users alike going forward.

Here’s to a more bug-free Box! Now, on to the next round of new features…

We’ve got some great stuff coming up, but what new features would you like to see?

Post by Sean Lindo, Community Manager

Just two weeks ago, we launched a really cool feature called Global Folders. As a refresher, Global Folders lets you turn any folder of content on your Box account into a public web page with your very own”vanity” URL. For example, I set up a folder to share press launch material at http://www.Box.net/BoxPressResources. In a few clicks and a matter of seconds, I had a web page with screenshots, logos, case studies and datasheets ready for the press to see - and I didn’t have to code any HTML or go through a webmaster to publish it. What a relief for all those webmasters out there!

After a couple of weeks, we’re already well on our way to having thousands of global folders out there for the world to see. We’ve seen so many creative uses for it already. One of our good friends, DJ AM set up his own Global Folder at www.Box.net/djam to share a few of his music mixes - and tweeted it to his 65,000+ followers on Twitter.

Of course, you can use Global Folders to share all kinds of content and we’ve seen some great examples already. We’ve come across realtors sharing marketing material, project planners sharing building plans, teachers posting course materials, authors putting up writing samples, clubs distributing schedules and membership material - we have even seen one of the premiere hotels in the world create a global folder on Box.

What will you do with it? If you haven’t already, set up a Global Folder and get yourself a vanity URL or two.

Send us a tweet @boxdotnet and let us know - what’s your Box address?

Post by Sean Lindo, Community Manager

Box.net CEO Aaron Levie loves to spend as much time as he can at Box HQ, working on the next big thing. Today, however, Aaron took a few hours out of his schedule to speak at Gilbane Conference San Francisco. He spoke as part of a session on next generation knowledge management and social networks - more specifically, how to use social media and networking tools in enterprises to improve knowledge sharing.

Presenting to a packed room and an engaged audience, Aaron’s main theme was about how businesses can “socialize” their workflow in a way that addresses leadership concerns and still offers the benefit of connecting employees and making sharing simple. He illustrated this by diving into what makes consumer social networks so widely adopted: speed, community and openness.

- Speed: If you want to share a file, collaborate on a project or search across all content to learn from others successes, it has to be as simple as possible.

- Community: Imagine being a business leader who can, at any time, have an immediate look into the activity of your business. That kind of “passive” discovery has fueled social networks like Facebook and can fuel additional sharing and discovery in a business context.

- Openness: An open platform gives businesses the ability to easily customize a solution to their needs, expanding what businesses can do within a solution and providing users with greater access to critical information, wherever they are.

Aaron’s panel was moderated by Oliver Young, senior analyst at Forrester Research. He was also joined by Nelson Ko from the TikiWiki CMS/Groupware open source software project.

Aaron fielded a lot of questions from the audience, which was great. If you’d like to catch one of his talks live and pick his brain in person, he’ll be speaking at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston later this month, which runs from June 22-25. If you’re going, send us a tweet @boxdotnet.

Post by Sean Lindo, Community Manager

Getting things started this week, I decided it would be fun to go into the “way-back” machine - you know, get our flux capacitor groove on. If you don’t know where that reference is from, just send me a tweet @boxdotnet and we can talk.

Last fall, Box.net and Dell announced a partnership to provide a free Box account to Dell Mini netbook owners. To celebrate, we teamed up with TechCrunch to give away five Dell Minis. Over a thousand readers posted a comment on why they needed a netbook. While it wasn’t easy choosing from so many deserving people, I thought it would be fun to look back and see who those people were and what some of them had to say about their daily Mini use:

- Rick, a member of the U.S. armed forces serving in Afghanistan, said a Mini would be great for his rig, hooking into Wi-Fi hotspots, using Skype in the field, watching a movie and playing the occasional game.

- Ira wanted to give a Mini to his mother, a community organizer in Panama. He later wrote us and said she carries the Mini “all over the place because it weighs so little.” Ira’s mother also volunteers at a seniors home and leads health dialogues at an international school there. She constantly uses it for Skype, surfing and creating documents online. 

Ira's mother, right, volunteering in Panama

- Brian wanted to surprise his girlfriend with a new computer. She was just starting college and happened to be the first in her family to move on to college. Brian said she’s off to a great start, uses the Mini all the time and has a 4.0 GPA. 

- Brent thought the Mini would be a great way for his mother to stay in touch with family and friends who couldn’t visit her because of her health condition.

- Kishore is a college student in India who wanted to make better use of his time on long, dusty bus rides to school. He said the Mini came in handy at a recent school event: “[I had to] wander around quite a bit on campus and it really made a difference! It’s so incredibly light. I’m having lots of fun always having it with me…”

It was a fun contest to do and we’re happy we could celebrate and help a few good people out at the same time.

Post by Sean Lindo, Community Manager

Continuing a series of interviews with members of the Box.net team, I’m happy to share an interview with Mike Cardamone, who’s part of Box.net’s Business Development group. He sits down with us this week to talk about building the Box reseller channel, growing up in a big Italian family, his “money” ping pong skills and Syracuse sports.

What’s your official title at Box - and what does it really mean?
I’m a Business Development Manager - it means I work on generating revenue through various channels including the reseller program and other partnerships. 

What is it like pitching a SaaS product like Box to resellers? How do they respond?
As SaaS products continue to gain traction more and more, VARs and MSPs are very open to having conversations about SaaS products.  Just like most businesses these days, their clients are looking for solutions that can tangibly help their business at an affordable price.  Managed Services is becoming a more popular way of doing business for resellers, which leads to more resellers that specialize in selling services with a subscription-based model.  

You’ve had conversations with dozens of resellers. What are the most important things in building a thriving reseller network?
Well, I am still working on figuring out the exact formula.  Over the past six months of running the Box Reseller Program I have learned what resellers look for in a vendor.  Resellers want to partner with vendors that provide solid partner support, provide a solution their clients need and give them an opportunity to gain net new clients.  I think the most important thing when building a reseller program is to really spend a lot of time listening to your partners - find out what other vendors they work with, which ones they have been successful selling and why. You can learn a lot from your existing partners. 

Can’t do this interview without giving you a chance to plug the reseller program - in plain words, why should resellers become part of the Box network?
Thanks Sean, I appreciate it.  Resellers should consider joining the Box Reseller Program for a number of reasons.

First off, I am not going to name any names but I can’t tell you how many times I have been told by one of our partners how much better our partner support is than other vendors they work with.  We provide extensive support throughout the sales cycle to make it as simple as possible for our partners. 

Secondly, almost every business shares files and collaborates both internally and externally.  Box provides a great solution at an affordable price and can solve pain points their clients almost certainly have.  

And finally, resellers can earn high margins and a new recurring revenue stream while providing a solution that can scale on its own, creating new clients for the reseller. 

I know you went to Syracuse and Columbia - how did a New York guy end up here in the Valley?
As much as I like NY I always had a small part of me that wanted to try living in California.  I had visited San Francisco a few times and really enjoyed the city.  When I was getting ready to graduate from business school last May I had decided that I wanted to come to the Valley to work for a start-up technology company with a lot of potential and was lucky to be introduced to Karen, our VP of Business Development through a mutual friend.  I couldn’t be happier with my decision and I foresee myself being out here for awhile.  

You’ve mentioned that you grew up in a big Italian family - having that kind of upbringing must help in this role, right?
I am not sure that the size of my family has helped, but I think my parents did a great job of really emphasizing the importance of things like integrity, reputation, loyalty and hard work.  I think even more relevant is growing up as an identical twin which made me the very competitive person that I am, which is important in a role like this.  

The ping pong table at Box sees a lot of fierce competition and I understand you’re one of the top players here. Are you ready to move on to the pro leagues?
I am going to give you the modest answer and agree with you that I am “one of the best.”   I can tell you that I played in a ping pong tournament back in grad school and came in 3rd out of over 50 people, and won some money.  I am pretty sure some of our sales reps here owe me money as well so maybe I do have a future as a “professional” ping pong player. 

Last question - who’s your favorite Syracuse player of all time, in any sport?
I was at Syracuse when they won the national championship in basketball in 2004.  Carmelo was the star of that team and you have to like Hakim Warrick as well, but I think my favorite was Gerry McNamara.  The guy could flat out shoot the 3 ball and hit every big shot when they needed him to.  

Post by Sean Lindo, Community Manager

Memorial Day weekend typically marks the unofficial start of summer and we hope you had a chance to enjoy it with family and friends and remember all those who have bravely served this country and all who are serving today.

Now that summer’s here, we’d like to celebrate it with new features that can help you be more productive -and give you more time to enjoy your summer. Since we launched the all-new Box in February, we have added Web Documents, Full-Text Search and a fresh set of OpenBox services - all focused on helping you do what you do need to, so you can get on with your life.

Today, we’re excited to introduce three new features that bring workflow and branding tools to Box:

- Tasks: Create, assign and manage tasks around your files.
- Global Folders: Turn a folder of content into a publicly shared webpage with your own personalized URL - no HTML or web coding required.
- Custom Branding: Customize the look and feel of the Box UI to project your company’s brand whenever you share content with internal and external partners.

Tasks: Be more productive in creating your content
Tasks is a simple way to manage workflow around creating, reviewing and finalizing content. For new or existing files, you can assign yourself, someone else or a group of people to:

- Review a file: For those “take a look and let me know what you think” situations.
- Approve/reject: Get the final word.
- Update a file: Ask someone to upload a new version of a file.
- Custom task: Create your own kind of task. Like “Publish on Website.”

To create a task, simply hover your mouse over any file, click “Tasks” and select what kind of task you would like to assign. You can create multiple tasks and even include comments.

Keep track of tasks on the Box sidebar in the “All Files” view.

It’s a great way to keep track of what you need to do in the same place you manage all your content.

Global Folders: Share your content with the world…in seconds
Sharing has always been at the heart of the Box experience. Global Folders lets you take any folder of content and share it as a public webpage with your very own personalized, static URL. In other words, it’s a way to broadcast any of your content to the world.

It only takes a few clicks and no web or HTML coding experience whatsoever. At the “All Files” level, click on the “Share” button and select “Customize this address and make global”.

From here you can select the Global folder option, create your own URL and you’re set to go.

You can check one of ours out at http://www.Box.net/BoxPressResources. It took me about five seconds to set that up.

Custom Branding: Bring your company’s look and feel to the Box UI
Professional tennis player Andre Agassi famously said, “Image is everything.” Whenever you share content with Box, especially with external partners and customers, you want to project a professional look at every turn – you want to project your brand.

Now, with Box’s new custom branding feature, Business edition customers that add this feature can quickly customize the look and feel of the Box UI with their company logo, color scheme and other basic information in the header and footer.

Using your “Enterprise Settings” menu in the Admin Console view, just click on the “Branding” section. From here, you can customize the following:

- Header logo
- Header background color
- Text link colors in the header
- Navigation colors
- Text fields in the page footer

Many customers have beta-tested this feature and their custom UIs look great:

There’s something for everyone in Box’s new bag of tricks. Whether you want to be more productive in creating and managing content or you want to broadcast it in a more personalized way to more people, these new features open up new doors for what you can do with your content on Box.

We said it was going to be a big year for Box and our customers – keep reading the blog to see what else we have in store for you.

Things are starting to heat up…just in time for summer.

Post by Sean Lindo, Community Manager