Monday, June 29th, 2009

Calling All Frustrated SharePoint Users! This One’s for You

By , co-founder and CEO

Since Box.net’s beginnings in 2005, we’ve been driven by a set of core values and have worked especially hard to stay true to one in particular: Sharing should be simple.

In fact, it’s a simple concept. Yet many companies still offer collaboration software that miss the mark in keeping it easy for you, the user. We’ve heard everything from permission issues, to browser incompatibility, to small things that unnecessarily require an IT admin to step in, so we thought it was time to take a stand for simplicity.

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One service in particular, and coincidentally the largest, is Microsoft SharePoint. We hear from SharePoint users, integrators, resellers and administrators alike that when it comes to flexible group collaboration and sharing, SharePoint is just not working for them.

We want to make sure that people know there are alternatives to SharePoint, so we’re issuing a challenge. Check out Box and see for yourself how easy it is to share files both inside and outside of your company. If you don’t think Box is easier to use, after a free 14-day trial, we’ll provide you three months of SharePoint for free. Yes, you read that correctly. We believe in our product so much that we’ll get you on SharePoint if we’re wrong.

Check out http://www.box.net/simple to find out more about our challenge. We’re giving away some fun t-shirts for people that want to help spread the word. Just tweet your SharePoint stories with #SharePointBlues. If you already use Box, you can help spread the word too – especially to any of your SharePoint-using friends! We’d like everyone’s help in this campaign.

And yes, that’s a real billboard on 101 in California.

- Aaron

P.S. If you’re a SharePoint MVP, partner or consultant, we want to talk to you as well. While SharePoint might be appropriate in some circumstances, we’re sure you have clients that would benefit from a simpler way to manage content. If nothing else, we value your opinion and hope you’ll join this conversation. We’re all looking to make it easier for people in businesses to share content and increase their productivity.

Showing 18 comments

Joe June 30th, 2009

I’m not sure about the challenge. One things about sharepoint, I dont have any broken links. Your http://www.box.net/simple is not working. thanks

Sean July 1st, 2009

Hi Joe – thanks for checking it out. If you click on http://www.box.net/simple, it loads up just fine, so I’m not sure what you mean by broken links. Could you be more specific? We’d obviously like to correct something on the campaign page if it isn’t working properly. Thank you.

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[...] too. We also took some nice group photos with everyone sporting the fun t-shirts we created for our Box vs. SharePoint Challenge. Good times… Till next week, we wish everyone a fun and safe weekend – and to our [...]

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GP August 23rd, 2009

It appears that the first time you click on the link (http://www.box.net/simple) the page doesn’t load. Second time it worked. Same thing happened in both IE7 and Firefox 3. Don’t know what could cause that, but you should check it out. First impression is not good.

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[...] our billboard along the 101 last summer, calling on frustrated SharePoint users to take the Box.net challenge. We invited SharePoint customers to trial our service with the promise that if they didn’t [...]

praves April 5th, 2010

I tried couple of times, not just two times. The page did not show up at all.

Sean April 7th, 2010

Thanks for the heads up! It was down temporarily, should be fine now.

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