BoxWorks 2022: Securing the future of work

Work has changed drastically. As teams embrace the many benefits of a hybrid workforce, they need new ways to connect and collaborate, while staying vigilant against emerging security threats.

That’s why we’re excited to announce new innovations in the Content Cloud that empower teams to work securely together from anywhere, on any type of file, in any application — all while delivering better, faster results and great experiences. With Box, your opportunities are truly limitless.

Collaboration and workflow updates include:

• Box Canvas for interactive visual collaboration and whiteboarding
• The all-new Box Notes for secure, real-time collaboration from anywhere
• Content Insights for visual analytics that show the impact of your content
• Box Sign capabilities and integrations to address more  e-sign use cases

In frictionless security and compliance, we’ve added:

• Zero trust security features for more granular and flexible controls
• Ethical walls as an information barrier between different user groups
• Malware deep scan enhancements
• Stronger protection against ransomware
• More flexibility to Box Governance retention policies
• New US public sector certifications for cybersecurity

And when it comes to your tech stack, you’ll see:

• Enhancements to integrations across Salesforce and Slack
• Updates to Box for Microsoft integrations
• Rich insights in the Admin Console for increased transparency and visibility

Build a purposeful collaboration strategy with Box-native tools

We’re focused on delivering modern collaboration experiences that inspire users to work however and wherever they want. For that, we’re bringing you Box Canvas, a reimagined Box Notes, and Content Insights — a flexible set of Box-native collaboration tools with greater functionality, so teams can get more done right from Box. Work together, on your own, or with your go-to integrations, and push the boundaries of easy collaboration like never before.

The all-new Box Notes, available today, gives users a secure, real-time experience for quick and seamless content collaboration. Notes can also help teams tackle more extensive documentation, project management, and development-type tasks.

We’re also excited to announce that the public beta of Box Canvas, our new visual collaboration and online whiteboarding tool, is coming in January. With Box Canvas, hybrid and remote teams can truly connect and collaborate in new ways that go beyond traditional communication styles.

So whether you’re building out a new process or conducting a workshop, Canvas gives you infinite space to bring processes to life and provides all the shapes, sticky notes, connectors, and more that you need to:

• Brainstorm and share ideas
• Solve problems, strategize, and analyze
• Create high-level design diagrams, plan projects, and even teach new concepts

Finally, with the new Content Insights releasing later this October, you’ll get the power to understand your content’s impact. This will allow users to see how your content gets consumed, how often, how much, and on which days. Given the exploding amount of digital content being shared and distributed, this type of visibility is critical.

Automate e-signature workflows in the Content Cloud

Helping our customers get work done means empowering teams with the ability to transact digitally. Last year, we rolled out Box Sign globally, delivering unlimited e-signatures in the Content Cloud for customers in Business plans (and above).

Today, we announce new features to help address more complex and higher-volume use cases and unlock more cost savings. With custom branding, we’re enabling you to drive brand awareness and offer your clients, partners, and employees an enhanced, on-brand signing experience. Multi-doc packages and signer attachments unlock use cases like employee and client onboarding, contract management, application processing, and more.

Expanding beyond our marquee integration with Salesforce, we are also excited to announce the Box Sign partner ecosystem covering Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM), Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and more. This includes partner integrations with UiPath, Appian, Crooze, VersaFile, Certa and others, enabling customers to streamline their e-sign workflows.  Additionally, we have integrated Box with Signix so joint customers can store documents e-signed with Box Sign, as well as documents notarized with Signix, in one secure location on Box.

Enable built-in, frictionless security for your organization

Bad actors often steal credentials to gain access through phishing attacks, allowing them to get to the data they’re after. That’s why we’re focused on providing the most robust identity and access management capabilities. Soon we’ll add email-based MFA and backup codes as an authentication option; and we'll continue to bolster zero-trust controls. For example, you’ll have the ability to terminate user sessions with programmatic self-service remediation via the API and apply security policies based on defined user groups, starting with Device Trust.

We’re excited to announce ethical walls, a new feature in Box Shield to prevent the exchange of information between different user groups within an organization that could lead to conflicts of interest. This is in Beta now and coming soon! To further prevent data leakage, we’ll also be expanding our document watermarking capabilities to video files, which is especially important for those in the media, retail, and entertainment sectors.

Last year we introduced malware deep scan in Box Shield — it’s our deep learning-based malware detection that helps security teams to identify emerging and unknown malware types. And we’re excited to announce that we’ve added coverage for additional file types, including those in Microsoft Office. We also fine-tuned our detection model for better accuracy, and we're improving alert event descriptions so security operations teams can better respond to incidents. All of these features are now generally available.

Ransomware cost the world $20 billion last year, and the number is exponentially rising. That’s why we’re committed to mitigating the risk for our customers. Today in Box, we already have a malware detection and a file recovery process, facilitated by Support, to protect customers from ransomware attacks. We’re not stopping there and will be introducing a self-service content recovery tool, so Box admins can easily restore impacted files to a last known good state — bringing a recovery operation (that normally could take weeks) down to 15 minutes!

Easily ensure seamless, global compliance

This year, we made substantial improvements to retention in Box Governance. We released modifiable retention to provide our customers the flexibility that they asked for, and now retention policies can be easily updated as business needs evolve. We’ll continue to take Box Governance to the next level by simplifying how you export and review content under legal hold, improving our Box Sign integration with event-based retention, and adding trash as a disposition action. Lastly, we’ll provide better reporting and disposition insights for the visibility you need across your entire organization.

The global regulatory landscape is also growing increasingly complex. Earlier this year, we expanded our Box Zones global footprint to France — this update is now available to help organizations with in-region content storage. We also released GxPsandbox testing, allowing our GxP customers to validate new features on a quarterly basis before they’re released to production. For the US public sector, we received StateRAMP Moderate Authorization and now have a Box for GovSlack integration.

We’re also excited to announce that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has granted Box a High Authorization to Operate (ATO) at the agency level. This allows the VA to expand their use of Box for Controlled Unclassified Information. In addition to the 50+ FedRAMP Moderate impact level authorizations that we already have, we’re currently “In-Process” of attaining a FedRAMP Marketplace Designation — Authorized at the High impact level with the VA as the Box sponsor.

Admins: Get greater visibility and transparency

See what’s going on across your organization and easily take action on any abnormal activities with rich insights, delivering you analytics, visualizations, and calls-to-action. Coming soon, rich insights will include a configurable insights page, so you can tailor your landing page to what’s top of mind at your organization. Tools include new dashboards on key collaboration and security metrics and a new reports API.

Work the way you want, with the apps you love

Finally, we recognize that collaboration happens in lots of different ways — and with many different apps. And we know how important it is for users to have a choice in the technology they use and in their work styles. We’ve made it easier than ever for customers to seamlessly integrate with over 1,500 integrations — and you’ll never have to compromise on content security or manageability.

We’re pleased to announce enhancements coming soon to the Box for Salesforce integration, which lets you access and manage the sales content you have in Box, without leaving your CRM. Today, users can request signatures with Box Sign directly from within Salesforce. Soon admins can enable a custom folder structure in Box mapped to their Salesforce objects and records, and users will have the ability to search for their Box files across Salesforce.

In addition to strengthening our integration with Salesforce, we continue to deepen our other major partnerships with companies like Microsoft, Slack, and Zoom to further interoperability between Box and partner platforms. Progress includes enhancing Box for Microsoft Teams so IT organizations can choose Box as the default content layer to streamline how users with content within Microsoft Teams. Or rolling out co-authoring on Microsoft Office files across desktop, web, and mobile — with edits automatically saved back to Box.

Extend the value of the Content Cloud to custom applications

Finally, we continue to bring new innovations to the Box Platform, which allows customers to take advantage of our APIs and developer tools to extend Box to meet any scenario. We’re continuing to simplify the developer experience. With an enhanced Preview UI Element, developers can now extend a richer annotations experience to their custom applications and portals. We also released an application code collection, which showcases sample code for all common application use cases, including file & folder creation, metadata management, and e-signature workflows.

Custom app insights, coming soon, will allow developers to define and view key information about the apps created in their enterprise, and share those with the admins who install the apps.

For Box admins, we announced the CLI automation library, so admins can automate repetitive tasks, including user and folder provisioning and Box Zone assignments.

Let's take on the future of work

We're thrilled to introduce all of these brand-new capabilities across the entire Content Cloud, so you can tackle the limitless, digital-first future of work.

Want a deeper dive into the products or an instant replay? We’ll upload recordings after each session, so check out BoxWorks on demand.