Announcing the New Box View and the EOL of Crocodoc and the Box View API
Three years ago, Box acquired Crocodoc to power a truly first-class content viewing experience for documents in the Box web and mobile applications. We also offered this technology as a standalone API service, known as the Box View API, which allowed developers to convert and display documents in their own applications. Additionally, we continued to support developers using Crocodoc to do the same. These API services, however, were built using legacy technologies and on a separate technology stack from the core Box API. This resulted in a poor experience for developers and made it difficult for us to maintain and introduce improvements to these services. To alleviate these issues, we set out to build the new Box View service.
Today, we are excited to announce that the new Box View is now generally available to existing Crocodoc and Box View customers. The new Box View allows you to display high-fidelity, interactive viewers for documents, images, videos, 360 images and videos, 3D files and dozens of other file types in your web and mobile apps. Using the new Box View, you can display nearly any file type without having to build your own viewers.
You can learn how to start using the new Box View in your apps today with our Getting Started Guide.
The new Box View offers several improvements over Crocodoc and the legacy Box View API, including improved rendering fidelity, expanded support for new file types, and advanced security functionality like encryption and virus scanning. The new Box View is also built on the same technology stack as the Box web and mobile applications, allowing for continuous improvement and expanded capabilities to be introduced over time.
The new Box View is intended to be used in place of the existing Box View and Crocodoc API services. To that end, we will end-of-life (EOL) Crocodoc and the legacy Box View API services on January 15, 2018. This means you will need to migrate your app and its content to the new Box View. We understand that this migration will require development time and resources and we will continue to support the existing services for more than a year in order to give you ample time to migrate. You can check out the Migration Guide to learn more about moving your application to the new Box View.
We're excited about this new service and can't wait to see all the amazing apps you build with it. We also understand that you may have come to rely on Crocodoc or the legacy Box View API and we are striving to make the transition to the new Box View as seamless as possible. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to email us at [email protected].