What’s new in Collaboration at Box: Fall 2022

At Box, we’re focused on helping organizations, teams, and individuals collaborate and thrive in hybrid work. And, we’re always making improvements that cut back on busywork and reduce distractions helping you increase your efficiency. This quarter, we’re proud to showcase new features across Box Notes, Preview, and the Box Mobile app that are designed to help you take back time and focus on what matters.

Box Notes: Flexible formatting and streamlined uploads

This fall, we launched a re-imagined Box Notes that helps teams work together securely in real time anytime, anywhere, and on any device with an experience that “just works”. This supercharged experience boasts a powerful new back-end infrastructure that fuels increasingly sophisticated use cases. And, it enhances Notes’ well-loved, user-friendly interface with new content creation, formatting, and organization capabilities.

As a fast follow to all-new Box Notes, we are launching three new features that make it even easier for you to format text, upload files, and work with tables:

• A simplified color picker lets you format text color and shading with a single click
• New image upload formats offers support for adding .gif, .svg, and .bmp files by dragging and dropping them into a Note
• A seamless copy and paste experience for tables so you can easily move data from Excel to Box Notes and retain formatting (Coming soon)

Box Preview: Work more efficiently with improved usability and speed

If you work with different internal and external teams, chances are you’ve been sent or collaborated in on a variety of file types--like videos, images, PDFs, slide decks, and more. Few things are more frustrating than being heads down on work and realizing you can’t open a file because you don’t have software or app it was created in.

With Box Preview, you can work across file and document types without having to open the app the content was created in. Simply Preview your files (or those shared with you) in any Box application without downloading them to your device. With comments and Annotations, you can communicate more precisely by leaving feedback  within the file in Preview on web or mobile.

We’ve made a number of enhancements to Preview that streamline file viewing and make sharing content easier. Updates include:

• New link unfurling capabilities that display a snippet of content for public links shared on LinkedIn or Twitter
• Enhanced performance including faster file rendering and access with a PDF.js update
• Easy downloading of PDF versions of files directly within Preview (Coming soon)
• Improved sidebar performance that saves time and let’s you see all activities related to a file faster (Coming soon)

Additionally, following from our release of editable shared links (ESL), which lets you easily create and send shared links to other users immediately and give them editing permissions to files, we are excited to announce that ESLs have been enhanced and more closely integrated with Box Preview. If you access a document in Preview via a shared link, you will now be able to see or use Comments, Annotations, Recommended Apps, and Box Metadata (dependent on user permissions).

Box Mobile app: Power productivity on the go

Staying agile and putting hybrid work to work for you is more important than ever. That’s why we added Capture Mode--the ability to take photos, video, and audio recordings or scan documents using your mobile phone’s camera--to the Box Mobile app. With built-in optical character recognition, or OCR, scanned documents are instantly turned into searchable PDFs, so you can find exactly what you are looking for. Best of all, Box Mobile app is available at no additional cost in the Apple App Store and on Google Play.

Over the last quarter, we’ve worked to improve the browse and preview experiences on the mobile app. Geared toward helping you be more productive, these releases include:

• Improved filtering and sorting to help you find exactly what you need (when you need it)
• Streamlined navigation on Android that includes breadcrumbs
• New display option on iOS  that let you choose to display document pages as either fit to width (default) or shrink to fit full page

Content Insights: Understand your content’s impact

One of our most exciting releases this quarter was Content Insights, which is now available to all customers. Content Insights shows how each individual piece of content is being consumed, who’s using it (both internally and externally), and when it is being accessed. And, with easy-to-understand visualizations, you gain a clear, at-a-glance picture of content performance and engagement, so you can better understand your content’s efficacy and make content-related decisions based on facts, not guesswork. With Content Insights you can:

• Measure engagement with content views and downloads
• Track performance over time with one-click views
• See who is accessing the content and how it’s being used

So, what’s next?

We’re committed to delivering modern collaboration experiences that inspire you to work however and wherever you want. And, we want to offer more collaboration tools with greater functionality so you and your team can get more done directly in Box. Up next, look forward to visual collaboration and whiteboarding with the Box Canvas public beta.

For more information on collaboration at Box, check out ourebook.