Box - Intelligent Content Management Reviews

Our clients' primary use cases are for business, mostly enterprise.

One of the coolest features in the enterprise is nominal file requests. Let's say you're getting a tune-up to your state plan, and the law has changed. There is a questionnaire with some documents and the paralegal sends them to you in just a normal email with the custom URL. You don't have to have a Google account for Google Drive or a Microsoft account for OneDrive. The fact that you are within the time window and within the credentialed determination, Box is aware of who does everything. They're the most compliant company we've ever encountered. We never run into a FIPSE or HIPAA or Sox issue with Box because they check every one of the boxes every time. So you never have to worry about that. To finish the story, you get that email, click on that link, fill in some answers on a TLS secure webpage, they give you a place to upload, and you're done.

From our user side or client side, when you hit that submit, you get deposited right in their client file, in your folder. And every one of your answers becomes metadata that will accompany all of your documents, all the way through your journey. This eliminates errors. It eliminates redundancy. It eliminates retyping. It's searchable. It's taggable. Really, really exquisite. 

The other thing about Box is that it has a really, really simple installation of the desktop component. And their new one, Box Drive, the users love. It creates a thumbnail, a meta, in your Explorer, whether it's Windows or Mac so everything you have access to in the cloud version you also have in the browser version. It's so easy, especially for older users. We find if they're over 40, then they have a much easier time with Box.

We've never had a penetration. We've never had a security issue that their support didn't solve. We love their audit trail. We can know exactly when a collaborator opens. We love how you can define a collaborator.

Let me spend a little time on that because that's really important - Box versus other cloud storage. Instead of being one dimensional, it's three dimensional. You can visualize a little matrix. Do you want them to be able to download this thing or just look at it? Do you want them to be able to upload and not download? Do you want them to be able to edit? Do you want them to be able to print? You can inhibit or enable any of those. So you can be dealing with opposing counsel and you don't want them to download, you just want them to see it, because your only responsibility to the court is that they can see it. But you don't want them stealing your work product. Box protects our client's intellectual property while allowing them to do business. So it's really exquisite.

The user interface is straightforward and simple. We also do a bunch of pro bono. One of our clients is sobrietyhouse.org, the largest, oldest, lowest recidivist rate, lowest cost rehab in Colorado. We regularly deploy Box there. We've tried to help this year with Save the Stages, with helping various musicians and other creators. This is a good example of how flexible Box is. 

In our corporate account, we will have extremely confidential information. We can create a folder set, share it to a band in Boulder and let them use that to collaborate vids, MP3s, tracks. Everything that they're trying to get ready for their Facebook Watch. And we can jump on and help. Box Note is like notepad, but 100 people can be on at the same time, tuning and perfecting, which works beautifully for lyric development.

That's completely isolated, works fine, costs them nothing. It's subsumed under our umbrella Box enterprise account. Because we have an unlimited number of external users we can add it's got a good genome. Yet, it wasn't designed by marketing people. It was designed by engineers and people who actually did work for a living.

I have been using Box for about nine years.

I recommend doing the trial first, because it's not cheap ware. It's not overly expensive, but it's not cheap ware, and enterprise has a minimum number of users. Of course, it's nothing for us because we were well in excess to that minimum. But check your pricing. Don't think that just because Google Drive is cheaper that doesn't make it better.

On a scale of one to ten, I'd rank Box a 10. And I rank their customer service a 9.5. Because they're not as good as GravityZone, but they're better than anybody else out there.

We use Box for sharing content between devices. For example, if a call is received when we are out of the office, we can use Box to patch in and collect the data, off-site. For mobility purposes, It is better than SharePoint. 

Within our company, there are just over 50 employees using this solution.

We use it frequently for documentation transfer.

Box is very user-friendly; more so than SharePoint.

Sometimes, their website doesn't work properly. It could be improved with a better user interface.

The UI should be faster. Sometimes it lags when switching between documents. 

Sometimes it is compatible with our other devices, but sometimes it's only allocatable to use in the proper way. It's not really optimized for high compatibility with other devices.

I have been using Box for six months.

The stability is good. I had never experienced any issues with it.

We have a limited document size (no more than 50MB) so we don't have any scalability issues.

Our team doesn't do maintenance, but they do provide some technical support.

I haven't personally contacted technical support. 

We also use SharePoint. Overall, I prefer SharePoint over Box; but that's only because I am more familiar with SharePoint as I have used it longer than Box.

Our clients use this solution. I have never been involved with the initial setup.

I believe Box is cheaper than SharePoint.

It's a good tool for everything. It's very similar to SharePoint.

I would recommend Box if you are going off-site to meet clients, for mobility purposes. If not, then I would suggest SharePoint.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Box a rating of eight.

We use Box as a cloud-based storage service for our employees. We are using it to share documents, such as presentations, between people. Some of our customers have many gigabytes in files and we set up shared access to them using Box.

It also allows us to maintain and manage all of our documents across the network.

The interface is very good.

The integration with other products should be improved.

We have never had any specific issues related to the stability of Box.

We have not been in contact with technical support.

Prior to Box, we used a Microsoft storage solution. We chose Box because of the advantages that it has.

Box is on-par with other similar solutions that are on the market.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We primarily use Box for sharing files within our group.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the set of security options that can be set when sharing files with a group. There is a lot of flexibility in that you can assign specific people read-only permissions. It can be done at the object level, or the folder level.

The application is very light in terms of uploading and downloading files.

With respect to the end-user experience, this is a very simple solution.

Better integration with other solutions is needed. Some use cases require the user to integrate with a document management system, or they may want to do some sort of workflow management. For example, if they want to maintain an integrational ERP system then different departments may have different requirements. The legal team will require a different set of controls than the HR department, and they want to have some sort of workflow as a process. I do these things manually because they are lacking in this product. If an ERP needs a file stored in Box then it should be able to download it directly.

I would like to see an indexing system because without knowing the filename, it is difficult to find what I am looking for amongst thousands of files. It would be nice to have some sort of metadata.

I have been using Box for five or six years.

My team has had no issues in terms of stability. My use case is really simple and straightforward.

With perhaps 200,000 users, we have had no issues with scalability. 

I have not been in contact with technical support.

We use several other tools for content management such as Documentum, Alfresco, and SharePoint. The choice of tool depends on the use case.

We have our own in-house team that deploys this product.

My advice to anybody who is considering this type of solution is to first formulate the use case. Box has certain limitations, but it is very plain and easy to use. If you need collaboration in terms of document management then it provides a simple interface that offers differing levels of granularity in terms of access control.

This is a good solution but it does not address all of the use cases for a content management system.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

First, the device-agnostic cloud storage and collaboration. When we first deployed Box, we managed all of our own storage. Using Box for cloud storage allows us to focus on the service and maintaining infrastructure. Box has a number of nice features such as mobile apps for access to files; ability to collaborate easily with anyone, on campus or off; special collaboration and sharing features, such as emailing attachments to folders, embed widgets to upload or interact with files, and more. The introduction of Box Drive makes using Box on the desktop a joy.

Faculty, staff and students can collaborate with their peers on and off campus. Members of the University community have found many creative ways to use the platform. In some cases, they were able to really streamline processes and in others they were able to do things they never could before. Some units have migrated their content and processes from on premises storage to Box, saving money and time, and putting the power of collaboration into the hands of the users instead of requiring admin intervention.

Support for larger files.

Improvements in speed - Box's high level of security impacts performance, especially when compared with other similar services. While it's understandable, it's annoying.

We've used it since 2012.

Nothing major. We were early adopters of Single Sign On with Box, so we had to do some heavy lifting there. However, with the work we and others have done with Box, this has become much simpler and more straightforward. We deploy the service as an opt in, so we did not need to do a broad scale forklift of content from old systems to Box.

Box has been very stable for us. Only rarely are there any performance issues and these are usually degradations of a particular function.

We've deployed it campus wide and currently have nearly 100K active users - a very large deployment. We have not had any issues with scalability from the user perspective. That's been rock solid. However, we have had scale issues with the admin console. With our number of users, sometimes reports can't complete or queries take a very long time. Box is addressing that now with new reporting technology.

Excellent. Our dedicated Customer Success Manager is very attentive and very committed to giving us a good experience with Box.

Once you reach the right people it's excellent. Like with many help desks, our scale means that we often have more familiarity with the product then their frontline help desk staff, so sometimes it's a challenge to get to the right level.

This was our first foray into cloud storage and collaboration.

As I mentioned above, SSO was tricky to set up. We were able to get it all going in just a few months, though.

In house, working directly with Box.

Our pricing and licensing is excellent. I'd tell all Higher Ed customers to talk with Internet2 for excellent pricing and support.

We worked with a team of other universities and Internet2. That team explored the cloud storage market at the time. Box was the best offering we found.

Leverage the existing community of expertise out there. Ask the sales rep to put you in touch with other customers. We're happy to talk with folks looking to deploy Box.

• IFRAME Widget (To publish documents on another web page). Most of the best CMSs don’t offer any good DMS features. Not even many products as an add-on or plug-in. So why not take one of the best DMS (box) on the market and integrate (embed) the functionality for publishing public documents? Or even better, integrate box as a secure extranet for your business.

• Office Integration. The full integration into the Microsoft Office products is just perfect.
• Versioning (Version History). This feature allows previous versions of files to be stored all in one place, allowing you to quickly find and restore previous versions of your content. Or even better, real-time co-authoring in Box for Office Online
• Document Preview. Previewing and collaborating without ever having to open a desktop application or download the content to a computer.

There is no easier way to publish a (new) document to the web (via the IFRAME widget). Just put the file in the right place!

Data privacy, regarding where to store your data: Offering several transparent(!) options (where to store my data and whether to sync back or not and where to sync) regarding the local law situations (USA, EU, Switzerland!) would increase the credibility of a US based company (after NSA ‘snooping’).
In Switzerland, many firms of different sectors face strict regulations around where their files are stored, leaving them with a limited set of options, and keeping many of these enterprises stuck on legacy infrastructure. Box Zones is a good initiative or start, but its not perfect at all.

I have used Box from 2012 until today.

We have not had stability problems.

We have not had scalability problems.

I rate support 8/10.

We used Dropbox, SugarSync, and Google Drive.

Setup was pretty much straightforward.

A business account has a minimum of three users. If you are more than three people in-house, go for the Enterprise version. All the external users are free of charge.

We looked at Dropbox, ownCloud, Google Drive.

Check first all the possibilities where to store the data. (Where are the data servers located and how are they synchronized/mirrored.)

Simple file sharing and sync for internal and external customers.

File sharing for projects and other unique activities have been greatly enhanced.

Maturity of the enterprise security around user management.

We have been using this solution between two and five years.

There were no deployment issues. Box consulting services provided an excellent, repeatable process to follow.

There were no stability issues.

Core functionality remains solid.

There were no scalability issues.

I would give customer service a rating of 7/10. Most support organizations have room to get better.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10.

We had a previous solution and we still use it. We provide options for users to select the best of breed of two solutions.

The setup was mostly straightforward. The light weight/simplicity of the solution is one of the leading features.

We implemented in-house with Box consulting services.

I truly believe that Box should have a box consulting division which would really enable customers who do not necessarily want to work with ISV's. I mean a division who could really help write business specific apps.

9 months

Not really

Not until now

No issues encountered so far, except for large files (we have some 50GB+ files who we now have to split up

Great!

Technical support people really know their stuff, Great service.

Yes, OneDrive for business, but we had a lot of problems with instability

Very straightforward, we got it setup for about a thousand people in less than a day

In-house

I believe it is a great product and priced very well so I can only recommend it

Yes, OneDrive for business

Box messaging has really revamped communication with in my company.The ability to collaborate around data anywhere, anytime is the most powerful features of Box.  

Box is extremely user friendly, however our clients have been having a hard time adjusting and understanding Box. It would be nice to have a more seamless integration with clients. 

1 year

Superb service. All of our questions are always answered in a timely manner. 

The ability to collaborate around data anywhere, anytime is the most powerful features of Box.

The word Box has become a verb at Morehouse College. The Students, Faculty and Staff are constantly pushing the limits of the Box.com platform by finding ever more creative ways to use it!

One of the greatest things is that they have not hit any limits.

Like all cloud platforms, there are always areas of improvement around sync to local devices. We are very EXCITED about the soon to be released Box Desktop for streamed file content. We are looking to beta the tool!

We have been on the Box.com platform for almost three years.

We initially tried a low tech approach to our data migration that failed, too much data to simply push over the internet; in comes SkySync to the rescue. We used SkySync to migrate files and permission from our Windows fileserver to the Box.com platform.

No.

No.

Box.com is one of our Premier Technical Partners!

They take ownership of any issues, and work them quickly to resolution.

We were complexity on premises, prior to our move to Box.com

The more you plan the better your migration will go, you must pay careful attention to the differences in permission structures.

Have not run detailed numbers yet, though we plan to. The reduction in risk alone on PII, HIPAA and FERPA will be huge factors in our ROI calculations.

I'm in Higher Ed, so we purchase through Internet2-Net+. I absolutely recommend going that route for Higher Ed customers.

Yes, we looked at Dropbox and OneDrive. Box.com had the best compliance matrix for the enterprise that we saw.

Love it!