 |
Box.net connects Microsoft Office, Windows and Mac to the Cloud
October 10, 2011 | Author: Adam Levine
Box.net CEO, Aaron Levy, came up with a new beautiful term "Smart Enterprise". Aaron opposes it Benioff's "Social Enterprise", hinting that a company (and business applications) in result should smart rather than social. And the main goal of business application is not to connect person to person but to connect person to needed content. So in general, all this stuff is quite abstract and unclear, but it sounds good and perfectly fits into Box.net mission - to provide a single, centralized cloud content repository for Enterprise. Box.net wants to integrate content from all (isolated) business applications, computers, mobile devices, offices to ensure that each employee can access the right content at the right time. To achieve this, Box.net has released two major components: Box for Microsoft Office and Box Sync.
Box Sync - the desktop application that syncs folders between the computer and the cloud storage - has been available since last year. But now it has turned from a personal tool to the company-wide layer. Now Box Sync can synchronize files between tens of thousands of computers. Besides, now it supports Mac.
Box for Microsoft Office - is a plug-in for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, which allows you to quickly save a document to the Box cloud account, open documents from there and quickly share documents to your colleagues. Thus it is possible to collaborate on document almost in real time. And unlike the Microsoft's own solution (Office + SkyDrive), it works with Office 2007 too. A little earlier Box also unveiled the plug-in for Outlook, which lets you send links to files rather than big attachments.
Box for Microsoft Office is available to all users free of charge. Box Sync - is available only in the paid versions.
See also: Top 10 Office suites
