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