Most people know Box for its document management software and services. Now, it wants to help more businesspeople take notes electronically.
On Tuesday, the cloud software pioneer unfurled a new desktop application—one that is based on Box Notes, a tool it created to help teams share comments and updates about content they share using Box’s file-sharing services. Box encourages its customers to do this digitally—rather than on paper in a notebook or in email threads—according to lead product manager J onathan Berger.
It shouldn’t be considered as a broad note-taking app—such as the one sold by competitor Evernote—or as a general collaboration tool, like the Slack corporate messaging service. (In fact, you won’t be surprised to hear there’s already a broad Box-Slack integration that alerts Box users when files are added to folders or revised in some way.) The information shared in Box Notes is specifically related to Box-related workflows, Berger noted.
Adoption of the tool, which has been around since 2013, has been growing quickly. Approximately 40% of Box’s Coins2Day 500 accounts—such as General Electric, Astra Zeneca, and Schneider Electric—use the existing browser-based version to bookmark information. Among the common tasks for which Box Notes is used: consolidating weekly sales updates, jotting down action items, or logging conference call discussions.
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So Box (BOX) decided to invest in adding more features to the app, talking up its ability to store these brainstorm tidbits securely alongside related information. The idea is to get more of its 69,000 customers to use it.
“The all new Box Notes makes it incredibly easy to capture ideas, take notes and share information while also benefiting from Box’s enterprise-grade compliance, security, and data residency features,” said Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie, in a statement.
Existing Box customers can download the app for free. A future edition will include the ability to take notes in an offline mode and synchronize them with the cloud at a later date.