AIIM Open Forum

So Box came out and announced Box Governance this week. For those of you thinking that Box is just one of the surfeit of file sharing providers on the planet, think again. Box has been steadfast in stating that they are providing content management and this week’s announcement is further proof of that.

Box Governance provides three important capabilities: 1) Retention Management; 2) Content Security Policies (really should have something about “sensitive information” in the name); 3) Defensible eDiscovery. While having these capabilities available is in and of itself a major step forward, it’s also important to note that organizations that choose to deploy Box can now claim compliance with a number of government and industry regulations and standards (e.g.: PII, FINRA, SOX, SEC 17a-4). However, the most important thing about this announcement, in my opinion, is that it serves to remove additional barriers to including Box in the conversation when talking about Enterprise Content Management vendors (pay attention Gartner, Forrester, IDC, et al). Coupled with Box’s Enterprise Key Management (my post on the topic) announcement earlier this year, organizations relying on FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) to exclude Box from consideration are losing rationale for doing so. Security and information governance are what separates true managed content from just another shared drive, and Box has them. Bleat all you want about cloud not being secure and cloud content repositories being unmanaged messes, it’s not working anymore.

Since BoxWorks last September (my thoughts) Box has made a number of feature additions, announcements, integrations, and alliances that are moving it closer to being able to deliver the right balance of System of Record and System of Engagement. At this point it’s still a little ugly and cumbersome for administrators to configure the backend to deliver the various governance, workflow, and security bits to work properly, but that’s what the team at Box Consulting is paid to help with. Those paid to worry about security, legal, regulatory, and audit have less to worry about now than a few months ago. From a content consumer/contributor perspective it’s all pretty slick and that’s what it’s all about.

It’s no coincidence that a white paper I wrote for Digital Clarity Group was released yesterday. The paper is about the next generation of ECM (#ECMnext) and how Enterprise File Sync and Share (EFSS) platforms will provide it. We’d (Box, DCG, me) love to get your thoughts on the paper. Feel free to reach out to any of us (you can reach me via email at chris.walker@phigsimc.com as I am no longer with DCG) to rant or rave. There’s no data collection, fees, marketing gates or other intrusive nonsense to get the paper, so download The Next Generation of Enterprise Content Management to your heart’s content.