Box (News - Alert) has thrown a punch, and it looks like it’s aimed to hit Google smack in its Drive by upping the social element.
The online file sharing and cloud content management service for enterprise companies has poised itself as a direct competitor against Google (News - Alert) Docs with its new document collaboration service, Box Notes. The new tool is basically Box's version of Google Docs, and represents the company's rise up into the bountiful world of applications.
Box unveiled Notes at its third annual BoxWorks conference in San Francisco. That same day, product manager Jonathan Berger took to the company blog to formally introduce the service to the world, and praise it as "a new way to create documents and work in real-time with others on Box." One of the perks of the app, which is free to Box users, is its "Note Heads" feature. These are icons that strongly resemble Facebook's Chat Heads, and they enable users to see edits being made to a document appear as it's happening. They also highlight the chatter making the edits. Box Notes take full advantage of could technology, allowing users to collaborate on a single document within the cloud, rather than clicking in and out of files separately.
Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, describes the experience of Box notes as going "a very simple social editing experience around content. It lets us go deeper. Rather than publishing content into Box, people can get their work and collaborate in real-time."
Box Notes goes hand in hand with Box's underlying share-anything-anywhere philosophy that has lured more than 20 million people to its services. Box is used by more than 180,000 businesses around the world. This goes a step beyond Google Docs with the social "real-time aspect" and also is leaps beyond traditional document programs like Microsoft (News - Alert) Word, which is about as collaborative as a game of solitaire. Box Notes is still in beta phase, but will be rolled out to all users within the next few weeks, Berger says.