M+E Connections

Having all your apps at your fingertips empowers you to move work forward, especially when it comes to Microsoft 365, according to Box.

With the Box Content Cloud, users get one easy-to-use platform that seamlessly connects across Microsoft Office and Teams, enabling users to get real work done, Emily Chen, Box senior product marketing manager, said Dec. 15, during the Box and Microsoft 365 webinar “Leveling up productivity with Box and Microsoft 365.”

And new enhancements to Box integrations coming soon will fast-track collaboration, communication and security, according to the company.

“We know that everything at work has changed and the rules have been redefined,” Chen said. “We have new hybrid workforces and teams are working together from anywhere, with any app, any device, and we have to be digital-first, enabling not only team communication to be digital but really the way we power all our key business processes. Every interaction has to be digital now.”

At the same time, “of course, security has never been more important,” she told viewers.

“With all of these changes, content remains at the center of everything that we do. So the content you work on together with your teams, that’s the heart of all your mission-critical business processes,” she noted.

Unfortunately, all that content is “stored and managed across countless siloed systems and business apps” at most organizations, she said.

There is also “not a great way to manage it all,” she pointed out. “So you have increased inefficiency, cost, complexity and risk and this problem isn’t going away,” she predicted. “In fact, it’s probably just getting worse because enterprises are only using more and more apps, and it can be redundant, duplicative and quite costly. Content is just stored in too many different places, making it impossible to find, manage and secure. And so we really need a better way” to store all this content securely.

“That’s where the Box Content Cloud comes in,” she noted, explaining it’s “designed with content at the center” and provides “one secure platform to manage content throughout its entire lifecycle.”

The Box Content Cloud protects the data from all kinds of data breaches, whether accidental or intentional, she said. It also helps users speed up their processes and improve quality while maintaining content securely, she noted, adding it helps “future-proof” your business.

Box integrates across the Microsoft 365 portfolio but she focused on Microsoft Office and Teams during the webinar because those are the two most popular Box integrations, she said.

“We have some major updates coming for each of them,” she disclosed.

The company is “always working to improve” Box for Office and a new enhancement coming in early 2022 will provide more seamless work capabilities, she told viewers. It will enable real-time co-authoring on Office desktop and mobile apps, enabling users to simultaneously edit on Excel, Word or PowerPoint files, with all changes automatically saved to Box’s platform, she said, noting that has been “one of the most requested features that we get at Box.”

In a few weeks, meanwhile, a Box for Teams update will enable users to be able to default to Box as a stored option within Teams, she also said. This will eliminate user confusion and content fragmentation caused by use of multiple content storage platforms, she added, noting Box gets requests for this feature all the time.