This is a bittersweet post for me to write. If you’ve been keeping up with the blog recently, you might have noticed a new name and a new voice on here. That new voice is of Ashley Mayer, Box.net’s new Community Manager. I’m excited to have Ashley on board and know she’ll do a great job leading our community efforts. Of course, I’m also a little sad to say goodbye to this role, as I have truly enjoyed interacting with all of you on our blog, Twitter, Facebook, emails and even your own blogs. As for me, I’ll still be at Box, focusing on product messaging, launches, branding efforts and other things, so you’ll still hear plenty from me. One thing I really liked doing is introducing you to other members on the Box team through our blog interviews, so I thought it would be fun to do one more as my “last post”.

Q: Ashley, you’ve been here about a week. I’m curious to hear what it’s been like for you, becoming part of the Box family.
A: Has it only been a week? I admit it was a bit of a culture shock initially - I came from a more corporate environment, and Box embodies the start-up cliche in the best possible way. My new coworkers are fun, a little goofy and incredibly dedicated to making Box.net the best collaboration platform ever. Period. They work hard, but they also know how to have fun…in my short tenure, we’ve had a company bowling excursion and a dessert bake-off, not to mention the free lunches and spontaneous ping pong tournaments. Everyone has been welcoming and accessible, whether it’s an engineer explaining our latest site improvements or CEO Aaron Levie sharing a rundown of future partnerships.

Q: Speak of the devil, what do you think of Aaron Levie, our CEO?
A: Aaron - known in this office as “Levie” - is definitely the most hands-on CEO I’ve ever encountered, and I mean that in a good way. He is involved in every aspect of product development (he sits among the engineers) and demands perfection and speediness. But he’s also the first to crack a joke, often at his own expense. Last night a few of us were working late and he wanders in and asks: “Which will prove more disruptive: Hulu or Chrome OS?” He’s very sharp and you never really know what question is coming next - it keeps us all on our toes.

Q: You’ve really hit the ground running in a short time. What can our customers and readers look forward to?
A: Thanks! It’s been a blast to dive head first into blogging, managing our Twitter and Facebook accounts, and engaging with the Box community. Stay tuned for some fun posts - we’ll continue to cover our latest product updates and partnerships, but we’ll also be introducing some of the behind-the-scenes members of the Box team, and maybe playing around with video. My first order of business, however, is to rally all our fans for The Crunchies - an award hosted by TechCrunch,GigaOM and VentureBeat. We’re vying for the “Best Enterprise Start-up” category, and we’d love your nomination.

So there you have it. The torch has been passed. Again, it’s been my pleasure serving as your Community Manager. All of you play a big role in making Box what it is and we’ll make sure it stays that way. Keep reading, keep sending us your ideas and make your voices heard.

You’re all in great hands now, so please give Ashley a warm welcome - we’ll be in touch!

Post by Sean Lindo, Marketing Communications Manager

Box ultimately makes sharing simple, but we take pride in the fact that we’re used to solve all sorts of problems for a variety of companies - from facilitating group projects and managing and tracking file activity, to creating virtual deal rooms.

One industry that we’re seeing a lot of interest from is legal. With every case comes a slew of files that need to be sent to clients, colleagues and opposing counsel in a quick and secure manner. We’re excited to share today’s news that we’re a featured vendor in the American Bar Association’s brand new technology marketplace, ABA TechEZ, as a collaboration and document management tool. Created by the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center and ABA Member Benefits, ABA TechEZ will educate firms that don’t have a dedicated IT staff on the software they can benefit from, as well as offer an ABA member discount.

We’re excited to work with the ABA as we strive to provide organizations with technology that affordably adds value to their business. Not only does Box provide a place to centralize all the documents associated with a particular case, but we also offer more security than email, control over file access and updates on who’s doing what. One of our legal customers, Gunderson Dettmer, which specializes in mergers and acquisitions, has this to say about Box: “Compared to putting files on a CD and mailing them overnight, I have parties in Texas and New York that can now download them in less than an hour. Being able to do that so quickly is invaluable.”

If you’re an ABA member, make sure to mention it to your Box.net sales rep to get a discount on Box for your firm.

- Matt Soldo, Senior Manager of Business Development, Box.net

This week we’ll be at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s annual user and developer conference, to continue spreading the word about how companies can benefit from integrating content into their Salesforce CRM deployment. In true Box.net style, we’re standing by our belief that sharing should be simple, and are excited to offer Dreamforce attendees the chance to win a free year of Box.net Enterprise Edition for their company (up to 50 seat deployment), which includes integration with Salesforce CRM. If you’re going to be at Dreamforce, visit us at lucky booth #13 and enter to win! We’ll announce two winners: one on Wednesday, November 18 at 7:00pm, and the other on Thursday, November 19 at 4:00pm.

In addition to leveraging the cloud to avoid unnecessary costs for on-premise servers, as well as overcoming email restrictions and FTP complications, we really believe that connecting Box and Salesforce CRM allows marketing and sales teams to work together more seamlessly.It’s a win-win for everyone, resulting in increased efficiency, accuracy, and ultimately, a bump in overall productivity as employees can get more done, faster.

Beyond entering the drawing, we hope you stop by to learn more about our recent and upcoming developments, discuss your content management needs, pick up one of our fun t-shirts, or simply just say hi. Hope to see you there!

Post by Amy White, Marketing Programs Manager

They may not be Top Gun pilots, but our Box engineers have a thing for speed. One might even call it an obsession. If you’ve noticed that you can now navigate your Box account at supersonic speeds, you’re witnessing their latest handiwork. Certain pages such as “All Files” and “Collaborators” now load up to six times faster, meaning you’ll be able to share and collaborate more quickly than ever before. And don’t expect it to stop here. In the words of Box engineer Florian Jourda, our goal is to make Box.net “the fastest collaboration platform on the web.”

To this end, we also want to help you streamline your movements on Box, so we’ve created a drop-down Folder Tree that lets you quickly navigate through all your files, folders and sub-folders and provides a nice quick shortcut for getting to the content you need:

By clicking the icon to the left of the folder location heading, you’ll access a condensed version of your folder lineup in alphabetical order, with an option to also view and select folder subcategories. No matter how many files or folders you have, you can quickly get to your content in just a few clicks.

Of course, our engineers aren’t only concerned about speediness on the web. If you haven’t already, please download the latest Box.net iPhone App (version 1.3), now available at the iTunes App Store. Not only is it free, it’s fast…the log-in speed alone has increased up to 500%! Now you’ll be able to quickly access, manage and share your content on-the-go. You’ll also notice a few other improvements, including large-format photo taking capabilities.

At Box, we believe sharing should be simple…and speedy. Over and out.

Post by Ashley Mayer, Community Manager

If you’ve been noticing some cool, subtle changes in Box lately, your eyes aren’t fooling you. Web Documents, our feature for creating wiki-like online documents in Box, makes it even easier to collaborate on these documents with others in real-time. We have also improved tagging to help you keep content organized and within easy reach. I asked one of our engineers, Jeff Seibert - one of the newest members of our team, via Increo Solutions - to give you the full scoop on our updates for Web Documents. We think it’s going to be a welcome set of improvements for everyone.

Web Documents: It’s easier for others to join the party
Box’s built-in web documents offer a quick and convenient way to take meeting notes, track new ideas, and manage projects. Easy to share, web documents are a great way to keep your whole team on the same page. You’ll notice quite a few improvements:

Fluid collaboration
It’s now easier than ever to work on a Web Document with multiple collaborators: when you are finished editing, or wish to pass control of the document on to someone else, simply switch to the Preview pane. When someone else takes control of the web document and starts making changes, you will be able to watch their edits in real-time.

Activity tracking
You can now leave Web Documents open in your browser without worrying about locking everyone else out. If you remain idle for a period of 10 minutes or more, the document will be automatically unlocked so that others can edit it. (Don’t worry, you will be warned that the document is unlocked, and you can always return to editing by switching back to the Edit pane.)

Spell-check this…
The spell-checking feature is now much more reliable, particularly when it comes to checking text that you pasted in from Microsoft Word or other programs.

Never lose work
If you try to close a Web Document with unsaved changes, you will now be prompted to save or discard them before continuing.

Your direct line to Box.net
We’d love to hear from you - next time you are working on a web document, click Feedback in the top-right corner and let us know what else we can improve!

Improved tagging: Making files even easier to find
Box has long offered the ability to tag files. With this update, we have simplified how you add tags to files and folders and made tags even more visible as you browse through all your content. To tag any file, simply click on the tag icon and enter a new tag, or select from existing ones. You also have the option to display tags while you’re in List View, providing quick links to other files tagged with the same phrase.

And there you have it. Stay tuned to the blog for updates, big and small. Post comments here or tweet your thoughts to @boxdotnet - we want your feedback, both positive and constructive!

Post by Sean Lindo, Community Manager and Jeff Seibert, Software Engineer

Since we launched an all-new, more business-focused Box this year, we have concentrated our efforts on making it easy for you to share content with anyone, from anywhere. Of course, a fair amount of that is on the product side, but another key component in realizing this vision are meaningful integrations with other business platforms. Businesses are turning to cloud-based services more than ever and we want to make it easy for them to centralize their files one place, while also providing the flexibility to work with them from the other applications that are core to their infrastructure, whether it be HR, finance, ERP or other department-specific software.

Our first step in this direction is an integration with Salesforce.com, the leading CRM on the web and one of the pioneers in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) space.

Unlimited storage for Salesforce CRM customers
Today, we have launched Box.net on Salesforce’s Force.com AppExchange and are offering unlimited storage exclusively to Box Enterprise customers that use Salesforce CRM, so you can easily share, access and work with presentations, product datasheets, how-to videos, agreements, contracts and all your Box files, right inside Salesforce. In offering unlimited storage to Salesforce CRM customers, we think it’s a big step in giving people complete freedom to share content through the services they use the most with the people they interact with the most.

How does it work?
Once it’s installed, you’ll be able to access Box when viewing a Lead, Account, Contact or Opportunity in Salesforce. Here you can upload, download and share files or use OpenBox actions, like sending a file through Outlook, editing documents with Zoho or EditGrid, faxing with eFax, printing and shipping using FedEx and more. There’s also a special Box.net tab that provides the full Box interface.

Getting started
If you’re a Box Enterprise customer and want to install Box.net for Salesforce CRM, your Box sales rep and account manager can work with your Box admin to get everything set up. If you are not a Box customer and are interested in using Box and Salesforce CRM together, you can learn more at http://www.box.net/salesforce or just give us a call at 866-495-0635.

It goes without saying that we’re big believers in what the cloud can do - and what an open platform can do. Connecting cloud services like Box and Salesforce is all about connecting people to their content in more productive ways. This is just the beginning - we are absolutely committed to providing a platform that connects businesses and their content to all the clouds and applications that help them do what they do best.

Post by Aaron Levie, CEO/Co-founder

Box’s built-in toolbox of OpenBox services just got a little bigger today. We’re happy to highlight two new services from Drawloop, which let you convert files to PDF right inside Box. You can convert individual files to PDF one at a time or combine multiple files into a single PDF file. These services are:

Convert to PDF
As a free service, it’s a quick and easy way to convert individual files, including Microsoft Office, image and other file types to PDF.

Combine to PDF
A more advanced service, “Combine to PDF” lets you select multiple files (even a combination of different file formats) and convert them all into a single PDF. If you’re a sales rep, for example, and want to share a proposal that consists of a cover letter created in Word, a quote in Excel and a product data sheet in PDF, you can easily combine them into one easy-to-send PDF. This is available as a subscription service from Drawloop ($1 per user/month), which you can check out with their 30-day free trial.

Best of all, Drawloop’s services support a broad range of file types:

- Microsoft Office, including Word, Excel and PowerPoint
- Microsoft Visio
- Microsoft Publisher
- Image files like JPG, GIF, PNG, bitmap
- Rich and plain text
- XML
- MHT
- WPD

Now you can easily convert all your files on Box into polished PDFs that you can share with anyone. As always, you can easily add these services and browse all our integrated third-party OpenBox services.

Post by Sean Lindo, Community Manager

We’re doing a little dance right now and hope you’ll join us. Last night, Box.net was named the #2 Fastest Growing Private Company in Silicon Valley by the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal for 2009. The award is based on revenue growth from 2006 through 2008. To make the rankings, companies had to have grown revenue by at least 30% in this time period.

How much did Box.net grow exactly? We’re thrilled to say that our revenue grew 869.51% from 2006 to 2008. That’s right. It hits you even more when you spell it out - eight hundred and sixty-nine percent growth. Needless to say, we’re ecstatic - and when you consider the fact that this was open to companies across all industries in Silicon Valley, we’re proud to say that Box.net was the #1 fastest growing private tech company in Silicon Valley.

While we found out in the last few weeks that we made the list and that we were in the top 10, we didn’t know where we’d finally rank. At an awards ceremony at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, they honored the 70 companies that made this year’s rankings. When they started announcing the top 10 companies one by one, we were on the edge of our seats as they moved up the list. We took friendly predictions around the company and our ranking blew most everyone’s expectations. It was a great night and all the companies had a good time celebrating together. We tip our hats to everyone who made the list. It’s gratifying to see the excitement and optimism of all these entrepreneurs during these times.

Most of all, we want to thank our customers. We couldn’t have done this without you and we will never forget what got us here. Keep telling us what you think and we’ll keep making Box the best and easiest way for you to collaborate online.

We dedicate this award to you!

Post by Sean Lindo, Community Manager

We are thrilled to welcome some new members to the Box.net family. While we are expanding teams across Box as we speak, our family also got a little bigger with the recent acquisition of Increo Solutions. Based just down the road in Mountain View, CA, Increo is the developer behind solutions like Backboard and Embedit.in.

So why did we do this? Well, we are always looking for ways to improve how you can view, share and collaborate on documents in Box and have long admired Increo’s approach to how people view, annotate and embed documents online. We saw it as a natural fit - Box lets you easily access, manage and share content, while Increo’s core technologies focus on all the ways you can interact with documents and media online. Ultimately, we think it’s going to provide you with really cool and productive ways to view content and collaborate on them with others.

If you’re a Backboard or Embedit.in user, I’m sure you’re wondering how this might affect you. In short, you can continue to use these services and support as you always have. We put together some FAQs to help fill you in.

With that said, we’re excited to have two of Increo’s co-founders, Kimber Lockhart and Jeff Seibert Jr. join the Box.net team. They’re already hard at work, helping us bolster Box’s document and media viewing capabilities and are working on some really cool things for you down the road.  We can’t wait to share what we’re working on, so stay tuned to the blog.

Help us welcome Increo Solutions!

Post by Sean Lindo, Community Manager

It’s good to have options. It’s no different when it comes to working with your files on Box, which is why we’ve added even more third-party services through our OpenBox platform. You might have noticed a few recent additions, including the ability to launch a web conference with Fuze Meeting and print and ship documents to FedEx, all within Box.

Google’s been a big part of our family of OpenBox services - you can send file and folder links directly to Gmail or Google Apps Mail and view download stats on files with Google Analytics. We’re happy to add Google Docs Viewer as the newest OpenBox service, which lets you view PDFs, PowerPoint presentations and TIFF images with Google Docs. We have been working with Google on this feature the last couple of months and are excited to finally bring it to you.

You can add the new Google Docs Viewer action from the OpenBox Services page. When you want to preview a PDF, PowerPoint or TIFF image, just click on the blue actions button where you can select “View with Google Docs.”

Happy viewing!

Post by Sean Lindo, Community Manager