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

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under New Features, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.