The New Box Experience: Building a Dream in a Box #BoxWorks

Aaron Levie is on a mission. The Box co-founder and CEO has a dream: he wants workers everywhere to have hassle-free access to the documents and other content they need to do great work from anywhere, at any time, using any computer or mobile device.  

Levie doesn’t want to deliver this capability to only the “Suits” but to anyone who works with content during their daily grind. And in an age where creating, referencing, sharing and collaborating on documents, images and other files is, increasingly, at the center of what we do day in and day out, this could mean everyone who gets a paycheck. That’s quite a sizeable number of subscriptions/licenses to sell and quite a dream.

Yesterday at BoxWorks, Box’s second annual user conference, Levie unveiled an “all-new Box” which is supposed to make it easier than ever for Box’s more than 14 million individual and 140,000 company clients to discover information, connect with collaborators and engage with content.

“People and content are at the heart of every business,” said Levie, during his conference keynote. “Our customers are transforming how they power collaboration and manage business information across applications, mobile devices and the cloud. Box’s mission will always be to deliver innovations that help them lead that transformation.”

Document Management for the People, By the People

And though it’s a bit of an aside, take note of Box’s messaging. Levy says that customers are changing the way they work with information — that they’re collaborating, being “social,” being mobile and storing their information in the cloud — and that Box is providing a service to make those efforts easier by managing the information for them and moving the technology out of the way.

Contrast the messaging that Content/Document management vendors used years ago that promised to keep CEOs out of jail. Box’s messaging is about empowering workers, more traditional Enterprise Document Management messages have been about protecting their bosses’ backs.

Content management is now as much about “the people” as it is the brass.

Connecting the Social Dots

You can’t talk about people without talking Social, especially in this day and age, and Box gets that. So the “all new box” includes some nifty (and useful) features such as including a pictorial list of the people you work in the right hand side bar of your Box screen, making it easier for you to connect with them. It also provides users with the ability to find coworkers who are also using Box by surfacing them via their corporate email IDs (which you provide).

The new Box experience will also give users an easy way to give each other a pat on the head via a new “like” feature. Some companies might see this as an easy (and, yes, potentially dangerous if the rules aren’t set right)) means by which to “approve” a document, to give someone a goldstar for their efforts or extend a compliment.

Taking the Pain out of Discovery

While Levie might not have actually uttered the all too familiar words “we’re putting search at the center of things” during his keynote, Box is doing that too. This functionality will allow users to see relevant results as they type in the search bar and be able to hover over a file to see who created it. Tasks and pending messages are in the header, too, so with a click users can find what they need to work on, no matter where they are.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Wrike Debuts Live, Project Management Tool with Real-Time Collaborative Text Editor, Email Sync

Project management system Wrike has debuted a new collaborative editing platform called Wrike Live. The new platform offers real-time shared editing of documents and tasks to keep teams on task and in the loop, so to speak. Here's what you need to know.

Modern Tools for Teams Large + Small

Online collaboration tools are key to a business's success, and one of the best features of Wrike Live is how well it syncs up with email. Wrike Live can turn emails into project timelines (illustrated in a Gantt chart format). Email a task to someone and cc it to wrike@wrike.com — the task will automatically be added to the project plan and displayed in chart format. It's a nice visualization that is easy to understand and process.

Wrike's Dynamic Timeline feature is a handy tool for managing tasks.

Wrike Live features a simultaneous co-authoring tool for teams working together on any project. There's no saving, no refreshing and all participants see updates as they happen. That goes for document collaboration as well as tasks and projects, something Wrike says is a first in market feature.

Furthermore, Wrike debuted its Activity Stream that displays a three-pane view to navigate between a live overview of project updates, details of a task and a project's structure. In this shared workspace, people can share files and images, discuss work and see each others' actions. The Wrike team likens it to feeling the pulse of a project.

Activity Stream shows an overview of a project and all the updates needed to stay on top of things.

Don't Forget the Cloud

There's a 30-day free trial of Wrike available, and the full release package for teams of 50 or more is US$ 200 per month. That allows for unlimited projects and collaborators and 100 gigabytes of storage. From there, prices range down to US$ 50 per month for up to 5 users.

Additionally, Wrike is available as a Google App for syncing even more workflow items. We posted a video below to demonstrate the real time updates of Wrike Live. There's no audio, so don't be surprised when you press play and it's silent.

 For more on project collaboration, check out this recent CMSWire article.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com