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Leader in cloud storage and collaboration, but they need to keep innovating and delighting customers to stay ahead of the competition
Updated September 30, 2015

Leader in cloud storage and collaboration, but they need to keep innovating and delighting customers to stay ahead of the competition

Andrew Ellis | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Enterprise

Overall Satisfaction with Box

We are using Box primarily as a sales portal to distribute sales and marketing collateral to our internal sales team and third-party brokers. Some sales managers also use Box to collaborate on content with their teams as well as share collateral with customers directly.

Several internal departments and teams are using Box as their central repository for storing and collaborating on content. We have not yet rolled out Box company-wide; interest in Box has spread mostly by word of mouth, so we have gradually deployed Box to the individuals and teams most eager to adopt it (as an alternative to SharePoint or internal shared network storage).
  • Box is available on every platform. The ability to access your Box content on any computer, smartphone, or tablet is a big win for our field sales team.
  • Box automatically versions every file with every saved change and makes it easy to review or roll back to previous versions. As a result, our users have broken their habit of maintaining multiple versions of their files with different version numbers or dates every time they make a change but want to retain previous versions.
  • Box integrates well with other cloud applications. For example, a cloud-based project management application we use lets you access Box documents within a project plan, so that we don't have to duplicate content across applications (the PM application simply maintains a link to the Box document, so you always have the latest version).
  • Box's original implementations of metadata and workflows were quite primitive and not all that useful. However, more robust versions of both are expected to be delivered in 2015, so I am eager to see whether we can make better use of these features.
  • Box's folder security design has one nagging limitation: Subfolders inherit all user permissions from their parent folders, and you can grant additional user access to subfolders, but you can never remove inherited permissions (that is, you cannot break permission inheritance). For example, you cannot set up a folder for a team of internal and external collaborators but maintain a single subfolder for confidential documents that you don't wish to share with external collaborators (i.e. stuff that would be for internal team members only). You would have to create such a folder outside the main team folder and assign unique permissions to it. This can lead to a proliferation of folders just to handle security exceptions.
  • Earlier this year, Box removed a user-friendly "Success and Training Corner" dedicated site and rolled all training content into their general support platform which is not as well organized. Training content is still there, but it's not presented as well. I understand why Box made this change, but it was a step backward in terms of onboarding new Box users and promoting customer success.
  • Prior to using Box, our IT department had to manually maintain a static sales portal website. Box allowed the business to take over the ongoing content updates, removing the IT bottleneck and allowing them to publish new sales and marketing collateral to the field much more quickly.
  • MS SharePoint,Dropbox,Huddle
We run SharePoint 2010, but our users found the project/team sites too intimidating and cumbersome to use for document storage, so it never really took hold here. Most teams still just dumped their content on a shared network storage drive.

I looked at Dropbox and Huddle as well during my evaluation of cloud storage solutions. At the time, Dropbox was still focused heavily on the consumer space, while Box catered more to the enterprise. Huddle offered an enterprise-grade product as well, but I saw Box emerging as a leader in market and mind share, and investing heavily in their platform. I felt that Box would be a safer bet for the long run.
Box is great for the basic use case of storing and collaborating on content with an internal and external audience, and being able to easily access it anywhere.

I would like to use Box for more formal document control and as a digital asset management system, but with its current limitations with metadata and workflow, I don't see it as a suitable replacement for systems built for these more specialized functions.

Using Box

100 - Sales and Marketing, Research & Development, IT
We will most likely continue our use of Box and push for even more adoption across our company. However, I am also keeping my eye on Microsoft OneDrive. My company has a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, so we are already entitled to use OneDrive. When I was evaluating Box, OneDrive was not where Box was in terms of features and functionality, but it is improving. If it catches up to or surpasses Box in terms of functionality, ease of use, and extensibility, then I would have a harder time justifying the additional spend for Box.

Box Implementation

Box Reliability