Blogs

There are two major tools that everyone seems to be talking about in the content management world- Box and SharePoint. On my drive to work on the 101 in Silicon Valley, I actually pass dueling billboards for Microsoft and Box; it’s crazy.

Now, stop me if you’ve heard this story before:

The SharePoint 2010 platform has all the bells and whistles to do on-site document management, records management, auditing, invoice capture, and every other cliche on the platform. If it exists in the content management world, it probably exists somewhere based on SharePoint, and the growth is accelerating.

Your users either love SharePoint so much that it has sprawled out of control across your entire organization, or they hate it so much they refuse to use it, sticking with shared drives or cloud systems instead, and making your CIO seethe with rage.

Here is the other side of the coin- Box just works for end users. You are probably already using a free account on a daily basis, and you use it to share and collaborate on content with users inside and outside of your organization. For me, it is one of my main business and personal tools.

A lot of users and organizations are in a really tough spot right now- they need the nitty gritty content management tools in SharePoint, but they love the look, feel, and mobility of Box, and today using both means having siloed systems. SharePoint is for content inside your organization, and Box is for outside. End users, however, are starved for the integration of the two, and just want things to work.  For an administrator, this is a battle that you just can’t win.

So, what do you do?

Luckily there is now an awesome (and currently free) tool that allows you to view, manage, and edit your Box documents from within SharePoint. In SharePoint terms, it creates a library for every Box account. Let me give you an example- you have a records management site in SharePoint and you have 15 users with Box accounts.  You can now manage all of this content from one place by adding your users’ Box content directly to SharePoint.

Everything that SharePoint can do, you can do with your Box data! Furthermore, you can use the amazing sync and mobile features from Box to collaborate and connect your content from outside the firewall.

Without the cloud, a small start-up like LivingAnalytics would be stuck with non-agile infrastructure that would not scale with the launch of their product.  Since this is running in the cloud, no infrastructure is needed, and it’s an awesome way to collaborate with developers, and once the development is done, you have a platform to share with prospects.

Sounds cool, right? We’ve released a free (like free beer) beta of the tool called Library Card, that you can try today.

Since this is still in beta, don’t get lost in the book stacks, and any feedback you have would be greatly appreciated.