Begin disclosure. My company, SugarCRM, is a technology partner of Box.net. This post reflects my personal views, not my company’s views. End disclosure.
Tomorrow, Box.net is going to launch their new version. They’re putting a lot of effort behind it, judging by the marketing they’re doing, and the tight lid they’ve had on what exactly the new Box is going to be. Simple, Open, and Mobile; those are the words they’re throwing around in the campaign. Pretty similar to where SugarCRM focuses our marketing, which helped draw my attention.
I had intentions tonight of doing a whole big blog post about what I like about Box.net, as well as a compare/contrast with DropBox. I’ll save that for a post in a few days, though, after the new Box launches and I’ve had a chance to see it in action.
My quick synopsis of Box:
- Good company
- Great technology
- Terrific value for businesses
- Even better people
I was lucky enough to be invited to Box’s launch party tomorrow evening. After they ply me with food and and open bar, I’m sure I’ll have even more good things to say about them!
Jason Nassi 
After a teaser like that, you’ve got me curious, with a good dose of red flags. Be interested to see what develops…
I’m looking forward to your comparison between the new box.net and Dropbox. I suspect the range of features in the 1st paid tier of service are a big piece of this, such as Google apps integration, desktop sync, versioning and centralizable managability (hoo boy, that’s a $10 phrase!).
The big point I’d make is that Box.net is enterprise-ready, and Dropbox really is a personal tool.
The feature I’d like for the enterprise is the Data Room (http://www.box.net/solutions/data_rooms). Their example: a deal room, where all the files about a contract negotiation are stored, some of which are shared with the partner, and all are versioned. This solves the problems of emailing MS Word files around, and additionally beats Google Docs by better segregating this data from the rest of your stuff, and giving you better management tools.
In practice, though, the deal room might still be missing assurance to the contractual partners that their access to the data — and in particulate the change record, cannot be revoked: “Hey, didn’t we agree to change that section last week? Why is it back? And Hey! What happened to the change record?” Box.net docs suggest they have the reverse: the ability to expire someone else’s access to the data. Maybe that’s more important…
As I say, I’m interested in your comments.