Box.net

Box.net is an online storage and workgroup collaboration system that allows companies and businesses to set up an online filesystem where they can store, modify and access files with security and simplicity and skips geograpic boundaries. One member of your work team can be in New York and collaborate with another one in Tokyo, while the team manager supervises everything from Amsterdam. You can do this without any hassles with Box.net’s services.

How many times has it happened to you that you need to give access to a large file to a third party? Or to a group of users? If you use the old-fashined approach and email a copy of the document to everyone, you lose control as to wether they are modifying it, if the copy that keeps being forwarded is the updated one or if everyone got a copy of the last modifications. With box.net it’s as simple as creating a link to that file and grant read, write, modify or delete permissions to such users. Files can be modified in real time by more than one user and every modification is sent to all other users, so that there aren’t any accidental overwrites.

Another top feature is that you can keep online libraries with all your information, which encourages re-use of such information and also saves time when a department has to look for a document that hasn’t been “used” for a while. You can grant read access to the entire department but keep modification privileges for those users that need it, avoiding potential information loss.

In order to store files in a secure environment, Box.net uses cloud hosting, which distributes computer resources among a cluster of servers, but also provides added redundance as if a hard drive fails, all information is immediately copied to other drives within the cloud minimizing the risk of data loss due to hard drive failure.

Box.net aims to defeat Microsoft’s SharePoint service when it comes to online work team collaboration tools and by looking at their impressive features list, it looks like they’re on the right track.

If you have used online document services like Google Documents with more than one user accessing them and modifying them, then you already know what online team collaboration means. If you haven’t then you should give box.net a try and see how it will save you hours of work as well as the potential losses of misinformation.

Even though Box.net provides online storage, it shouldn’t be used as a regular backup service, since it won’t update files automatically.