Asset Management

Box: New Relay Features Coming Soon (HITS)

Several new features will be added to the Box Relay workflow tool that Box co-developed with IBM, according to Murl Smith, a Box Education representative.

“One of the best things about Relay is that we’re just getting started,” he said March 7 during the webinar “What’s new at Box.” Box has “lots of great features already,” he said before offering a “sneak peak” of what he said were “some things we’re working on right now, coming in the near future.”

Those upcoming features include “the ability to launch workflows automatically, for example, when content gets uploaded to a particular folder,” he said.

Box is also “building out third-party integration, so that you can, while working on content in Box, also trigger events with other software that you use every day – for example, things like the e-signature process that will be seamlessly built into those workflows that you launch from your Box account,” he said.

Box also has “enhancements coming for our workflow dashboard, so that those of us who have to multitask every day will have the ability to manage several workflows right there from the same dashboard in Relay,” he said.

Relay was designed to enable users to easily build, manage and track their own workflows. It was announced at the BoxWorks conference in September 2016.

Box is seeing strong initial demand for Box Relay as the company readies the launch of its Box Skills artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning offering in the first half of this year, CEO Aaron Levie said Feb. 28 on an earnings call.

The company also made some updates to its Box Notes online, cloud-based word processing tool that Smith said on the March 7 webinar allows users to “collaborate in real-time in a Note or document right there from your Box account.”

For example, he said, with the new Inbox feature, “every time you log into a Box Note, you’ll be notified about which Notes that you belong to or that you own have recently been updated by others – either you’ve made changes or any of your colleagues who collaborate in those Notes have updated them.”

Other new features added to Notes were Differences, Presence and Templates. With Differences, “every time you open a Box Note, if someone else has updated or made changes since the last time you viewed the note, those differences are highlighted for you” – with blue indicators – “right there in the note,” he said.

With Presence, meanwhile, “whenever you open a Box Note, right there at the top there’s a list of all of your colleagues who have recently been making changes” or are in the Note right at that moment, he said.

With Templates, whenever a user opens a Box Note, he or she now has “the option to start that new Note from a Template” instead of starting the Note from scratch, he said. Custom Templates can be built by users in addition to the Templates already provided by Box, he noted.