Sharing and collaboration are at the heart of the Box experience. As you exchange content with more and more people, the ability to effectively monitor the activity in collaboration folders takes on greater importance. That’s why we rolled out a new set of advanced email preferences - we wanted to give customers more flexibility in getting the notifications they want, when they want them. Of particular note is a new setting that lets you receive notifications in one “daily digest,” making it even more streamlined.

You can set these preferences at the account level (under Settings) and for a specific folder ( go to Folder Options > Email preferences).

Using these settings, you can:

- Enable or disable upload notification emails
- Choose to receive a daily summary of upload, download and commenting events
- Configure a folder so that each upload or download event results in a notification email being sent to you.

The new email preferences can really help you tailor Box to fit your work habits and work flow. The “per event” feature, for example, is especially useful if you have a vendor contract folder so you can instantly know when a new contract is uploaded. Or, if you have a customer marketing folder, you can track when people are downloading your latest marketing material.

There are a lot of options, so we hope the new email preferences do their small part to make you and your team more productive. Of course, we would love to hear your feedback on this new feature, so let us know what you think! You can always send us a note on Twitter @boxdotnet too!

Post by David Lee, Director of Product Management

One of the great things about Box is the ability to use your content with dozens of integrated third-party services. You can edit documents with Zoho, tweak Excel sheets with EditGrid, fax files with eFax, digitally sign contracts with Echosign and tweet files to any of your followers on Twitter.

Today, we have added a new service from Fuze Meeting, which brings its web conferencing and real-time collaboration capabilities to Box. Using Fuze Meeting, you can start a web conference and share files in your Box account in one click. It’s a great way to share presentations, project plans and any of your content with colleagues, clients and partners, wherever they are. Since it’s web-based, you don’t have to download or install any software (unless you want to share your desktop), letting you join web conferences in an instant.

As always, you can add this service to your Box account by visiting our OpenBox services page, where you can learn about all the third-party services available in Box.

Post by Sean Lindo, Community Manager

We can all appreciate the satisfaction and reassurance that comes from knowing our voices are heard and that our opinions matter to others. It goes beyond a business or customer support perspective - these are things that matter to us in our everyday lives.

I’m the Community Manager at Box and in addition to blogs, forums and other channels, I’m always reaching out to people who get in touch with us on Twitter. It could be about any number of things - a kind compliment, a product suggestion or a question about one of our new features. I also keep up on tweets about Box.net in general and reach out to people that don’t necessarily follow us or even know that we’re on Twitter. Overwhelmingly, people appreciate knowing they can reach us @boxdotnet and that someone’s listening to what they’re saying.

I thought you’d also like to know that, now, it’s not just me who sees your tweets. We recently installed a bunch of flat screens in high-traffic areas around the office, streaming tweets about all things Box. People see them when they walk into our building, when they’re eating lunch in the lounge or walking by our engineering and marketing departments. Seeing those tweets really makes a difference!

It’s just one of many things we’d like to do to bring your voices closer to everyone on the Box team. We want to hear from all of you - things you like about Box and things you think we can do better. Tweet it out @boxdotnet, knowing that it’s reaching everyone here - and anyone else that happens to be around

We like to make a big deal about sharing around Box.net. While it’s an underlying theme for our products and marketing campaigns, it’s also about rallying people together to go out and help others in our community.

Kevin Jeffery, a member of the Box sales team, has been a long-time blood donor. This year, Kevin decided to get the whole company involved, setting up the Box Blood Drive in conjunction with the Stanford Blood Center. While it took about a month and a half to plan and handle all the logistics (like getting street permits to make room for the blood drive van), he saw it as an opportunity for fellow Boxers to do some good and have fun promoting a great cause.

Now it’s time for all of us to pitch in. This is a public blood drive, so we encourage everyone who can to come over and make a donation. We even have a fun Box t-shirt to commemorate the drive, so stop by!

Location: Box.net, 409 Sherman Avenue, Palo Alto, CA
Date: Thursday, August 06, 2009
Time: 11am to 3:00pm
Sponsor Code: 2037

If you have any questions and want to learn more about donating blood, visit the Stanford Blood Center website. You can also learn more about it on the Facebook page Kevin set up.

Sharing is good!

Update: Just modified the post to clarify that everyone who can come to Palo Alto and donate can do so! Thanks Manasa!

Post by Sean Lindo, Community Manager