Box Adds Social Workflow Features To Improve Mobile Collaboration
Box already made news earlier today with the launch of OneCloud, its suite of productivity applications that are accessible from mobile devices. But it wasn’t done — the company also hosted the last stop of its World Tour in San Francisco, where CEO Aaron Levie demonstrated what he described as a “reinvention” of collaboration on Box.
These features fall under the umbrella of what Box is calling its Social Workflow. He argued that while there are plenty of social business tools, these innovations haven’t made their way into document management systems, which he said are “stuck in time and not being updated to move to this post-PC era.” The goal is to bring some of the innovations from social network into Box, and also to make the collaboration process work better on smartphones and tablets.
The Social Workflow involves four main features. First, you can create tasks and track their progress. Second, you can call for the attention of a specific teammate using the ubiquitous “@” symbol. Third, you can now leave comments via email. And fourth, you can now edit content.
After Levie hyped up the new features, Box employees demonstrated them on-stage. They opened a document, looked at the comment thread under the document, then rather than leaving another comment, they created a task in the thread and assigned it to someone else. They also viewed the comment thread over email and sent a response (which makes it easier to contribute from a smartphone). And they showed off an Edit Mode for Box, where they could open Adobe Photoshop (or whatever software was used to create the document) directly from Box, edit a photo, save the changes, and have those changes upload directly to Box.
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