Box Offers Unlimited Storage And Office 365 Integration

Box is eliminating storage limits for its SMB customers and will offer enhanced integration with Microsoft Office 2013, Office 365 and Outlook from autumn in a bid to firmly establish itself as a cloud platform, not a storage provider.

The company abolished storage limits for its enterprise customers in 2010 and claims its customer base wants to be able to do more with the content stored on Box, and access it all in one place, rather than just sync and share.

“We’ve seen this work well in the enterprise environment,” David Quantrell, senior vice president of EMEA at Box, told TechWeekEurope. “We’ve continually said storage is not what we’re selling, this is not the business we’re in. It’s all about the functionality of the product that sits on top. That’s what people will justify the expenditure on.”

Microsoft integration

To this end, Box users will be able to view, save and edit documents directly from Box in the desktop and online versions of Office from autumn, while Outlook 2013 users will be able to send files as links rather than attachments.

“One of the biggest sources of data loss in companies is when people attach content to email and post it round and then you have no control over that content,” said Quantrell, claiming the feature would foster a collaborative environment while minimising the security risk.

Office 365 already has integration with Microsoft’s own cloud storage service, OneDrive, while Google Drive is closely intertwined with Google Docs. However Quantrell says the services are not competing with each other.

The Box platform

“I think what Microsoft address with OneDrive is very different,” he explained. “It’s a personal drive system where you want to put the files associated with you into that space.”

Quantrell said customers generally deal with content from “many, many places”, such as NetSuite and Salesforce, as well as industry-specific systems in the fields of construction, medicine and other sectors.

These customers value features like metadata, integration with enterprise reporting software, and the viewer which opens files within Box without using the required application.

“We’re providing a much broader set of services,” he said.

Box currently has 27 million individual users and 240,000 business and enterprise customers, including General Electric and Gatwick Airport. The firm recently announced it was to offer a permanent 50 percent discount to non-profit organisations as part of an initiative called ‘box.org.’

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