Exclusives

Box executives used the first keynote at this year’s BoxWorks conference in San Francisco to unveil several enhanced offerings for the company’s customers that they said will help power secure collaboration in the digital workplace and they also touted strides the company has continued to make.

Among the new Box offerings introduced Aug. 29 were several advancements to its cloud content management platform, including updates to Box Skills — the company’s framework for applying artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to content in Box – and the unveiling of new tasks and automations capabilities the company said were designed to drive digital business transformation.

“Box now has [more than] 87,000 customers, we’re in 69 percent of the Fortune 500 and there’s over [150,000] developers building applications and continuing to innovate on our platform,” Box CEO Aaron Levie told attendees.

As more companies continue to shift their file storage to the cloud, however, there remain “fundamental barriers to digital transformation,” including the continued reliance on outdated legacy systems and technologies, he said.

A new Box Skills Kit, which enables enterprise customers, third-party developers and systems integrators to build custom AI integrations with Box to enhance enterprise content, is available now in a private beta and will be made generally available in December, Box chief product officer Jeetu Patel told attendees.

Box highlighted several partners participating in the Box Skills Kit beta program, including IBM, and Box noted those companies are building “highly customized AI solutions for driving digital transformation.”

The company also announced support for custom-trained AI models in Box Skills that it said makes it simple for enterprises to apply customized AI models — created using services including Amazon Web Services (AWS) SageMaker, Google Cloud AutoML, IBM Watson Studio or Microsoft Azure Custom Vision — to their content in Box via the Box Skills Kit. Custom training enables businesses to address more specific use cases for AI, including identifying and tagging images of proprietary brands or products or identifying phrases specific to their business in audio transcripts, Box said.

Box also announced updates to its core task and automation capabilities that it said enables users to “create lightweight, simple triggers for recurrent actions that augment the collaborative work they do every day.”

Using Box Tasks and Automations, teams can “collaborate more easily, be more agile, and keep tasks like simple content reviews and approvals on track,” the company said in one of its Aug. 29 announcements.

Box Tasks provides for one-step content reviews and approvals straight from within the file preview experience on Box to easily move processes along, it said. Box Tasks and Automations will be available in early 2019, according to Patel.

New Box offerings also include a unified activity stream for files stored on Box that the company said will make it easier than ever for customers to see how their content is connected to other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications they use each day, including DocuSign, Salesforce and Slack.

Box integrates with more than 1,400 applications now, providing customers with simple, secure access to files whenever and wherever they need to get work done, according to the company. The new activity stream in Box will display the latest activity and relevant context from other apps right in the file preview on Box. With merely one click, the user will also be able to easily jump to that record or thread directly from Box, according to the company.

In addition to the activity stream, Box’s new file preview also presents a curated list of recommended applications that customers can use in conjunction with a file, so they can take action directly from Box – whether it’s quickly sharing a link with Gmail or posting a link to the file in Workplace by Facebook, or sending a file for signature with AdobeSign, according to Box.

The recommended apps will be based on various factors, including the apps that a customer frequently uses, the most popular apps used within a company, and those most closely associated with that file type, it said. The recommended apps displayed in the file preview will included only those approved by an organization’s Box Administrator.

The new activity stream and recommended apps are scheduled to be available in beta next year, Patel said.

Box also announced the public beta availability of its new Box for G Suite integration, as well as the public beta of Box Feed, which provides personalized real-time updates, activities and recommended content on Box.

The new G Suite integration with Box was introduced at Google Cloud Next in San Francisco in July, and includes the ability to create, edit and collaborate on G Suite files without leaving Box, all while maintaining Box’s controls, security and governance and compliance capabilities. Box also announced a new integration with Gmail that will enable Gmail users to attach Box files and download email attachments to Box, without leaving the Gmail interface.

The Box for G Suite integration is available in public beta now and the Box integration with Gmail is scheduled to be generally available later this year, Box said.

Box Feed, meanwhile, “intelligently curates and surfaces the content and updates that matter most” to customers, the company said in a news release, calling Box Feed a new way to view and interact with everything happening on Box. Box Feed will display the latest comments and updates to the files and folders a user is working on and provide recommendations on files a user cares about most based on his or her network of people and teams, according to the company. All the updates and recommendations in Box Feed preserve the permissions and privacy settings already set up in Box, meaning Feed is intuitive and secure, it noted.

Box Feed is available in public beta now and can be turned on for users in the Box Admin Console, according to the company.