Box announced Monday that it will be rolling out its Box Notes feature on iPhone and iPad apps soon. The app for Android will be updated to work with Box Notes later this summer.
Box Notes is effectively a chatroom that's connected to the documents on its cloud storage service. Users can communicate through text in real time in order to collaborate on project and discuss changes. The service is aimed at business users, with encrypted communication channels and several sharing options.
"At its core, Box Notes is about making it easy to work with others," says Box in a statement. "It promotes the sharing of information and collaboration. Live, concurrent editing lets everyone read and make changes instantly together."
"The real time collaboration allows us to quickly create agendas, follow-up on action items, and with new mobile functionality, I can see it allowing us to reduce time spent on email exchanges," says Bob Flynn, an IT manager at Indiana University.
Box Notes was originally announced for the desktop in September, but wasn't available to the majority of users until May. The feature boasts a variety of options for communication and sharing. Users can select which colleagues to share it with, or send a link to allow those who don't use Box to view the file. Notes are permanently available by default, but can be set to disappear after a certain amount of time.
The simultaneous editing feature of Box Notes brings its level with Google Drive, which has long allowed multiple users to view and edit a file at the same time. However, Box Notes does have some advantages for business customers, users can make notes available to anyone with the authorization to access a certain folder. This negates the need to authorize each individual member of a team separately.
However, Box seems to be lagging behind in the storage race. The service currently offers 10 GB of cloud storage for free, while Google Drive offers 15 GB. Microsoft is also making changes to its OneDrive service that will bring the free storage level up to 15 GB. Box's position as a business-minded service rather than a consumer, may allow it to hold its own against the other options for now, but there's no telling what the future may hold.
