Storage

Box Stretches Reach into Education

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 08/24/15

A cloud storage and content collaboration company has released a new "education bundle" to help schools streamline their use of its online service. Box for Education from Box provides templates for workflows, folder structures and security models to be used by educational organizations in setting up their collaborative processes.

According to General Manager Whitney Bouck, "Educational institutions understand that the cloud offers innovative ways to increase collaboration throughout their community, modernize teaching and ultimately cuts down on IT costs." The new resource, she noted, is intended to help users "create learning materials, share research, manage classrooms and communicate in a secure environment."

Among K-12 users are San Jose Unified School District and Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School in California and KIPP DC in Washington, D.C., among others.

Box also reaffirmed new integrations with technology from Google and Blackboard. Last April Box released Box for Chrome OS, which provides users with the ability to bypass the browser on a Chromebook and access Box files directly from the Chrome OS File Manager. The integration with Blackboard uses the Box View application programming interface (API) to allow Blackboard users to present Box-stored content in the web browser or on a mobile device through Blackboard Collaborate without having to download or install a plug-in or other utility.

The company said in early September it would be releasing new granular controls for Box Groups to help administrators better control access to sensitive information. This tool allows users to set up teams of Box users to give them access to the same content for collaboration.

Other tools for the software include Box Notes, Box Governance & Compliance and Box Enterprise Key Management. Notes, introduced in 2014, offers a way for users to work together in real time on documents. Add-on service Governance gives storage administrators a way to manage security and the compliance lifecycle of content for the purposes of e-discovery and regulatory policies. Enterprise Key Management builds on encryption and security functionality built in the product to give IT additional controls.