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.
About the Author
Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.