Content Cloud Summit 2022: New tools for the new ways we're working together

April 14th 2022 | Box News

Now that organizations — and, in many ways, the whole world — are opening back up in person, work and life look a whole lot different. The last couple years accelerated the move toward a digital workplace, a transition that had slowly been building for years. Businesses across all industries saw how working together virtually could offer better results, quicker turn-arounds, and with the right tools, improved security.

The shift to a hybrid workplace is a major opportunity for today's organizations, as long as they have a way to manage the content at the heart of every business process. Everything from onboarding new employees to launching marketing campaigns revolves around content, which means you need a way to get deeper insights on that content, connect teams as they work from anywhere, combat security risks — the list goes on. With all that in check, you can deliver the amazing, digital-first experiences your customers expect.

At Box, we work hard to help organizations of every size and in every industry get the most out of their content with one platform for the entire content lifecycle. We call this the Content Cloud, and over the past year, our vision has come to life with:

Box Sign: Free, unlimited e-signatures through the Box web app
Box Shuttle: Fast, easy content migration to the cloud
Box Notes: Secure, online notes built for real-time collaboration
Box Relay: Automated collaborative workflows
Box Shield: Intelligent, frictionless security to protect the flow of content
Box Governance: Content lifecycle management

But the Content Cloud is more than just the tools we offer. It’s also about the tools you already know and love. We’re the only platform that lets you connect to over 1,500 apps — like Microsoft and Salesforce — so you can get more insights out of your content no matter where it came from, what format it’s in, or where it’s going. And throughout your content lifecycle, our unparalleled controls and visibility will let you draw more and better informed insights, so you can do even more with your data.

Today, at Content Cloud Summit 2022, we’re announcing an array of exciting new products and features built to bring you into the digital-first future. As with everything we do at Box, we're focused on empowering your people with seamless collaboration and workflow, connecting your business with an advanced platform and integrations, and protecting your content with frictionless security and compliance.

Working toward success together

Whether your team is remote, in-person, or hybrid, we offer flexible, digital solutions to keep your teams working asynchronously or simultaneously.This includes secure collaboration tools that easily bring you, your team, and your customers together, as well as workflow tools that automate your business processes to keep you as productive as possible.

At the Content Cloud Summit, we’re demonstrating this vision by expanding how we help teams work together digitally.

Unleashing creativity together with Box Canvas

In today's hybrid workplace, teams expect an amazing experience as they collaborate with people across the organization and beyond. But as they brainstorm on ideas, build out project plans, and hold creative reviews, they're jumping from tool to tool to discuss their content. They need a way to combine the benefits of virtual and in-person collaboration, while also making teamwork both inclusive and engaging.

This was the guiding vision behind Box Canvas — natively integrated visual collaboration and virtual whiteboarding tools coming to the Content Cloud this fall. With Box Canvas, teams will be able to brainstorm and work together in a flexible, digital environment with infinite space. Teams will also take ideas from planning through execution in real time, making in-person meetings more productive. Canvas can even preserve workshopped ideas as a record, which means they’ll be there for future brainstorming. And best of all: Box Canvas brings the fun back into collaboration.

More signatures, less hassle with Box Sign

Whether it’s approving a work order, establishing an agency partnership, or bringing on a new employee, the first official step to many business collaborations often comes in the form of a signature. A signature represents a level of trust between you and the people you work with or for, but in a world where business can happen anywhere and at any time, you can’t always get an in-person signature. To maintain that same high level of trust with partners and customers from all over the world, you need an easy, trusted service to get your documents signed.

With this in mind, one year ago we launched Box Sign, a Content Cloud-native, integrated e-signature tool that offers customers unlimited e-signatures. And, since it’s built into Box, you can use Box Sign instantly right from the Box web app and make signatures available on your custom applications with our easy-to-use APIs.

Today, we’re introducing a new bundle of Box Sign features to help you and your team do even more without slowing work down, including:

Generating contracts within Box and sending them directly from Salesforce for signature
Batch sending a single document to hundreds of recipients at once to automate repetitive distribution tasks
Preparing documents faster and more smoothly with formatting options and six new dedicated fields: initials, name, email, stamp, company, and title

Discover how hard your content is working

Insights are invaluable when building content, but the information gathering doesn’t have to stop when the content is complete. With Content Insights, a new tool set to release in Q2, you will be able to track and analyze data about who is using your content and how it’s being used.

This means that the editors of a Box file can use the content analytics interface to see information such as the total number of previews and downloads for the file and how many people accessed it. Editors will also be able to see the most recent dates that a document has been viewed or edited, reducing the time spent ensuring a file has been received or taking next steps once a change has been made. And, with easy-to-understand visuals and user-friendly tools, also help your team track trends over time to understand the true impact of your content.

One platform for all of your apps

Collaboration happens anywhere, any time, and with a ton of different apps. With the right apps, your team can significantly boost productivity, deliver important insights, and make communication as fluid as if you were in a room together. The challenge is making sure your team has access to all of the apps they need in an easy-to-navigate format so they can work whatever way fits them best — without the risk of shadow IT.

That's why we created the Content Cloud, a single platform that lets you access the tools you love to unlock the knowledge within all of your content, regardless of where it came from or where it’s going. No other platform connects with over 1,500 enterprise apps like Zoom, Slack, and Salesforce — with an infrastructure set to add the new apps you’ll need in the future, all within one secure place where you can store, access, and share content.

Our platform brings the tools you use together with the ones your customers, partners, and vendors use, so you can collaborate seamlessly even if one of you uses Google Docs while another uses Word. We also provide APIs and development tools to extend and customize Box, with a developer platform that lets you create your own custom end user experience and run automation scripts to control how files are managed, users are provisioned, and other systems connect to the Content Cloud.

To boost the power of our platform, we have a comprehensive ecosystem with over 1,500 integrations of the applications that you already know and love, including Box for Microsoft Teams, Box for Microsoft Office, Box for Slack, and Box for Salesforce.

Box App Center: A reimagined home for your apps and integrations

Now, it will be even easier for your users and team to securely connect to the apps you know and love. The Box App Center is the new home to over 1,500 integrations, and the improved search mechanism simplifies the process from app discovery to usage. This unified content experience offers a seamless information flow across your entire software stack with the same enterprise-grade security, privacy, and compliance policies that you set and manage.

By bringing all of our integrations together in one place, users will have the flexibility to connect all of the tools they use in the enterprise into a single source of truth for content. This is huge news for users of all types:

End users: The Box App Center helps you work the way you want by making it easy to find partner apps like Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Office, Zoom, Salesforce, and Slack in our ready-to-use integrations catalog.
IT and admin leaders: Give your users the choice of the apps they need from our modern app integration catalog on Box.com and the Box web app. That delivers a great user experience while maintaining security and eliminating the need to use unapproved apps that leads to shadow IT.
App developers and partners: Since our customers’ needs are always evolving, we’ve given developers the ability to reach millions of users by building, submitting, and previewing custom apps and workflow automations in the Box App Center.

With the Box App Center, we’re making it even easier for you to find, use, and build custom apps that let you take full advantage of the power of the Content Cloud. It is already available to some customers, and will be generally available in May as a part of all our Box plans, so everyone will be able to access it from the Box web app.

Easier collaboration in Zoom

In the spirit of offering powerful integrations with your favorite apps, we’re excited to have deepened our existing partnership with one of the most important collaboration tools for the remote and hybrid work world — Zoom Video Communications, Inc. Available today through Zoom enablement and generally available starting April 17th, we’re announcing the launch of Box for Zoom Chat Channels, giving users the ability to:

Upload files into Zoom Chat Channels, and they’ll be automatically saved to Box. Zoom Channels will also map to corresponding Box folders, so that your content and communications can exist in one place.
Create new Box files, including Box Notes and Microsoft Office or Google Workspace documents, from Zoom Chat and grant users access to work together on those files in real-time, for reduced context switching.
Open documents in Box from within Zoom Chat Channels to collaborate with just one click, for maximized workflow efficiency.

Building trust by protecting data

Now that teams are returning to in-person work, businesses will once again have to rethink how they keep their customers’ data safe in a hybrid environment, while also enabling people to work how they want to. Since data protection speaks to whether your business maintains compliance and can be trusted by customers, this is a moment where strong security defines success in our new era of work.

At Box, we’re always thinking about how to offer even more protection for your business and the data you use. While we focus on security whenever we build a product, this is especially true in products like Box Shield— our frictionless security solution that protects against malware and other threats while notifying your IT team whenever a potential issue is detected.

Content protection with less workflow disruption

At the Content Cloud Summit, we’re announcing the latest Box Shield innovations that will further drive threat detection and data leakage prevention. This bundle of new capabilities offers more robust solutions to protect your content without adding unnecessary complexity.

This started last year when we introduced Malware Deep Scan, which uses deep learning to scan inside files to identify more sophisticated malware which could be missed by third-party threat intelligence. As remote working expanded, however, bad actors have increased the amount of malware they’ve been distributing through malicious Microsoft Office files. To fight this, we’ve added support for additional file types — including MS Office files — to give Box Shield the ability to detect unknown malware and even ransomware in more places.

Threats can also come from within your organization or those you work with — intentionally or not — which is why our next addition to Box Shield revolves around data leaks. Admins can now add a policy that ensures a watermark is automatically applied to classified documents. That way, end users know that they should treat classified content with more care, reducing unauthorized sharing.

Security is vital in content creation, curation, and distribution, but not if it gets in the way of work. This is why we just released a monitoring mode so that admins can passively monitor how security controls could interfere with end users. Once they fully understand the impact of access policies, admins can refine them as needed before enforcing them to minimize any disruptions to operations.

Doing more to prove compliance

Security is key to keeping your content flowing, but that’s only half of the story. Protecting your content is the ultimate proof that you take your customers’ personal information seriously. And for some industries, certification proving that you’re complying with data protection standards is mandatory.

Our compliance philosophy at Box is simple: We want to meet the highest bar for compliance in every industry, worldwide. This includes maintaining industry-specific certifications like PCI and FINRA for financial services, and HIPAA, HiTech, and GXP validation for health care and life sciences. Our new announcements at the Content Cloud Summit take these compliance protections even further.

To offer more support for U.S. public sector customers, we’re close to receiving FedRAMP High authorization. Receiving a High level authorization means that we’ve reached one of the highest bars of security involving continuous monitoring — so high, in fact, that only roughly 30 companies have earned it. With this, our federal customers can collaborate on their most sensitive unclassified data on Box.

Our progress in meeting FedRAMP standards also mean that we meet additional state and local compliance standards. One example of this is CJIS compliance, which means that Box will meet the security needs for criminal justice and law enforcement. Another is becoming StateRAMP Authorized, providing similar cloud security verification to state and local government customers as what is guaranteed by FedRAMP.

The last compliance announcement we made at Content Cloud Summit 2022 revolved around our life sciences customers. Our announcement that the GxP Sandbox Test Environment is now generally available means that all of our GxP customers can use a single sandbox release to meet their GxP validation needs.

Let's take on the future of work

We're thrilled to introduce all of these brand-new capabilities to bring your business into the digital-first future. With the Content Cloud, you have everything you need to take on the new world of hybrid work, ever-evolving security challenges, and a constantly growing data landscape. Your team will be the one building success with your partners and customers. You’ll connect and monitor every aspect of your business to discover new insights and opportunities. And you’ll be able to do all of this while assuring customers and regulatory boards that the data you’ve been trusted with will be kept safe.

Want a deeper dive into the products or an instant replay? We’ll be uploading video after each session, so check out the Content Cloud Summit sessions on-demand.