Accelerating Digital Transformation in Higher Education

This school year will go down as one of the most challenging and dynamic in history. Facing a daunting public health crisis, administrators and educators across the globe responded with determination, ingenuity, and creativity transitioning from traditional school environments to remote and distance learning. It's been truly inspiring to watch so many amazing institutions that that responded to the challenges head-on.

When we started Box over 15 years ago during our sophomore year of college, we could have never imagined what the world would look like today. At the time, Blackberry made the leading smartphone. Firefox had only just been invented. And the "cloud" was something up in the sky. Since then, everything has changed.  Cloud, mobile, and new ways of working and collaborating have transformed every industry and community -- and nowhere is that more clear than in education.

At Box, we're proud to partner with more than 1,700 education institutions around the world, including Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, Kingston University, and Yale University. Box helps facilitate research, the sharing of course materials, and the secure collaboration that keeps major institutions running. 

Over the past few months, I've spent time hearing feedback from our higher education partners around what Box can be doing better to serve this critically important community during a unique and challenging time.  I've received feedback on ways we can continue to improve our product, support, and pricing models. And our teams at Box have been hard at work addressing this feedback.

Today, I’m happy to announce that we will be doubling down on our investment in serving our higher education community with an updated Box for Education plan designed to help institutions scale and adapt to this new digital future we're moving toward. Our updated plans will better support Box for Education customers will be able to efficiently scale Box up in a cost-effective way, especially those with large-scale storage and usage needs. Here are just some of the key updates:

Great collaboration for students, teachers, faculty

We have been hard at work delivering new new capabilities over the past several months that will enhance the Box experience for both students and teachers, including:

• An all new Box experience on the web that delivers a simpler and faster way for students, researchers, faculty and staff to securely work from anywhere
• The ability to add annotations to 100+ file types directly in Box Preview, making it easier for students and professors to exchange comments and feedback directly on projects and documents
• Collections, a simple new way to organize files and folders around topics and work streams relevant to you, like classes, research papers, and group projects
• Better integrations and support for Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams, O365 and G Suite, which enables faculty, staff and students to easily and securely share content in Box while working in a variety of applications.
• Improved accessibility options at a.box.com to support the user experience for anyone who requires an accessible version of the Box application.

Strengthen your security and compliance posture 

As the need for campus collaboration and digital research between institutions continues to grow, so does the need to ensure that your content is secure and compliant. We continue to augment our core security and compliance capabilities with products like Box Shield as a way to prevent data leaks with frictionless content controls, to discover anomalous user behavior, to prevent the spread of malicious content, and to automate classifications based on information types like PII. And with the introduction of bundling our products into more cost-efficient Suites, it has never been a more attractive time to power the most important processes at your institution with the full power Box Shield, Governance, and Relay.

Supporting Box Education customers of all sizes

We know how important the work is that our higher education partners are doing, and we want to make it as seamless as possible to keep that work in Box. For many of our larger higher education customers, their storage needs require custom usage levels to support the scale of their institutions. We're excited to introduce all new storage options and pricing that make it easier to keep this content in Box no matter what the scale of needs you have. To learn more about these new storage options, please reach out to your Box account team.

Our commitment to the higher education community

The future of higher-education – like the future of work everywhere – is at an inflection point. While many aspects of how institutions will need to operate in the months and years ahead are still uncertain, we’ve been inspired by our community of higher education IT leaders and are excited to help our customers lead this transition. We will continue to focus on listening to your feedback, product suggestions, and ways we can be supporting the community even better going forward.  

To learn more about Box for Education, our updated features and plan, and vision for the future of collaboration in higher education, watch the video below featuring co-founder and CEO, Aaron Levie.