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

I have some very cool news - DL.TV’s Neha Tiwari (@nehalia) and Carlos Rodela (@onawa) featured Box on this week’s “Rad On The Web” (@radontheweb) segment, which was just posted today.

I’ve always enjoyed the DL.TV (@dltv) podcast - Robert Heron, Neha and Carlos all do a fantastic job covering the latest and greatest in tech and the web, so check it out and subscribe to their podcast if you haven’t already. They’re entertaining and informative, so you get the best of both worlds. We also did a few fun giveaways for DL.TV viewers - hope you were one of them! Don’t worry if you missed out - we’ll have more fun giveaways in the future.

Subscribe to DL.TV in iTunes or watch the video here.

Post by Sean Lindo, Community Manager

Box makes it really easy to share documents with anyone. And while we provide features that help you share documents securely, a new OpenBox service, WatchDox, brings an added level of security and tracking capabilities for sharing documents. Best of all, it’s easy to use and seamlessly integrated into Box.

“Many individuals and businesses need to share important and sensitive documents with partners, customers and colleagues, but are concerned about these documents falling into the wrong hands,” says Noam Livnat, VP of Products for Confidela. “WatchDox enables millions of Box users to not only share documents, but also control and track who views, prints or forwards them.

You can start using WatchDox within minutes. Here’s how:

- Add the WatchDox service from the OpenBox services directory.
- Choose the document you’d like to share and select “Send with WatchDox” from the file actions menu.

- Using the menu, you can enter recipients, what additional sharing rights they should have, who they can forward it to and when you’d like document access to expire.

That’s all there is to it. It’s an ideal service for sharing documents that require enhanced security - sensitive specs and designs for contractors, legal contracts for potential partners or confidential product and pricing information for a sales team.

No matter what kind of business you have, WatchDox gives you the peace of mind that your documents are protected and that they won’t end up in the wrong hands.

Post by Sean Lindo, Community Manager

Hey Boxers! We’ve got some cool feature updates for you this week, fresh from the Box.net lab. The new features include:

- A “Don’t Email” option when you upload a file
- A search bar within the “Collaborators” page
- The ability to add comments when previewing images - view supported image types
- Make comments at the folder level

Save some e-trees with less emails
I’m personally excited about the new “Don’t Email” checkbox that appears whenever you use the “Add Files” function. This allows you to turn off email notifications to all your Collaborators when uploading a file into a Shared (or blue) folder. Whenever you upload a file, just click the checkbox next to “Do not email collaborators about this upload”. Don’t worry - uploaded files are still visible to everyone collaborating on the folder, but they won’t receive an email notification when you upload the file. Now you can make it clear when you’re uploading a file you want everyone to be notified about versus those times you’re uploading something that’s useful, but not something of critical importance.

Find the right person from a long list of Collaborators
Have you amassed a long list of Collaborators and you find yourself scrolling through a long list just to get to the right person? Now you can rejoice, for we’ve added a search bar that allows you to go directly to the person you’re looking for. Just navigate to the Collaborators page and you’ll notice the shiny, new search bar below your profile icon.

Add comments to images in preview mode
While you’ve always been able to post comments on individual files, you can now add comments when previewing images. This is especially handy when you’re viewing a folder with lots of images because you can now view large previews and add comments as you go.

Make comments at the folder level
In addition to making comments at the file level, you can now make comments at the folder level. It’s a nice way to share your thoughts on a folder’s entire body of work.

Cool things are brewing at Box.net - be sure to check the blog each week to get the latest word!

Cheers! And until next time, happy Boxing.

Post by Amber Nguyen, Support Supervisor

We were fortunate to do a guest post for LinkedIn’s blog. As many of you know, Box has a great application that lets you share content you have on Box directly on your LinkedIn profile. For our guest post, we talk about how you can make your resume stand out by showcasing your best work. Check it out!

And thanks to LinkedIn’s Sheena Gogna for giving us the opportunity to share our thoughts with the LinkedIn community.

Link to Box’s guest post, “How to make your work stand out in a crowd of boring resumes!”

Post by Sean Lindo, Community Manager

Hey Boxers! I hope you’re all doing well. My quick tip this week has to do with search. We’re always working on ways to make it easier to find the content you need. That’s why we came out with full-text search, which helps you find files based on the content within a file, instead of just key phrases in tags or file names. We also added a couple of new search filters to make it even easier to find what you’re looking for.

Now, you can filter search results to include only individual files or folders. Here’s how:

1. Type your search phrase in the search field and hit ‘Enter’.
2. Click on ‘Filter By’ in the column headings of your search results.

3. Select either ‘Folders Only’ or ‘Files Only’ to refine your results.

That’s all there is to it. Keep an eye out for future enhancements to Box search - and for the next quick tip, you know where to find me. Happy Boxing!

Post by Amber Nguyen, Support Supervisor

We started a series a while back, introducing you to members of the Box team. So far we’ve covered people from the Development, Marketing and Support teams. This week, I’d like you to meet Julianne Baker, who recently joined Box’s Sales team. Since we launched the all-new Box this year, there’s been a huge uptake in businesses interested in what Box has to offer. We’ve been steadily growing our Sales team and Julianne was nice enough to take a few minutes out of her day to share a little bit about herself and what it’s been like so far.

Tell us a little about your role at Box - what are you here to do?
My official title at Box is Lead Qualifier. That means I’m typically the first point of contact for new potential business clients. I work with them to learn about their specific use case and how Box can address those needs. Once we establish that Box is a good fit, I work with our sales team to move the process along. 

What was it about Box that attracted you to the company and this role?
Well, I wanted to move into the SaaS sector and came across the opening for this position on LinkedIn. After reading more about Box, I really saw how it could appeal to businesses as a sharing and collaboration platform. If I can help businesses perform more efficiently with Box, that gives me a lot of satisfaction.

Now that you’ve been here for a little while, what’s your favorite part of the job? The company?
My favorite part of the role is the direct impact I can have on a business. Many of our clients don’t realize, at least initially, how robust a solution Box is. My role is to step in and help them see what we can provide. Another favorite thing is hearing how excited people get when they talk to an actual person on the phone. It makes a huge difference for them.

As for Box, my favorite part is the vibrant, youthful culture. My colleagues are wonderful, which makes working here all the better.

What would you say is the toughest part of the job?
It’s interesting because Box serves a lot of core functions really well, whether it’s replacing FTP or becoming a company’s online file server. Of course, Box addresses other needs when it comes to collaboration. So, I’ll come across cases where a business is using Box in a more limited capacity than what their situation might call for. The challenge is showing how Box can serve those other needs.  

The sales department in any company tends to have its own culture and vibe - how would you describe Box’s?
We have a fun, collegial atmosphere. It’s also competitive, as you might expect, but in a healthy way. We all share ideas to make ourselves better as a department. Everyone has the same goal, which is to serve our customers the best way possible and, of course, grow Box.

Where did you grow up - and what are you doing in Silicon Valley?
I have lived in a number of different places throughout California, Louisiana and Newfoundland. I was attracted to Silicon Valley because of the opportunities this area provides. Now that I am here, I am even more excited about being a part of this big shift to SaaS-based solutions.

People at Box would be surprised to know that you…(fill in the blank):
Come from a really large family. I have 5 siblings and about 40 aunts and uncles. Now that is a lot of birthdays to remember

If you could describe Julianne Baker in 140 characters or less, what would you say?
A very driven person with a goofball sense of humor.

Look out for more interviews with members of the Box team, including our Business Development team and some of the “old-timers” from Box.net’s early days.

Post by Sean Lindo, Community Manager