Have you ever looked at a top-level Box folder and felt overwhelmed by the prospect of having to dig through and drill down to every sub-folder just to know what the contents are?

Do you get discouraged at the thought of looking for a single file that could possibly exist way down the rabbit hole of Box folders and sub-folders?

Would you rather have the ability to glance at a snapshot of an entire Box folder and all the sub-folders and files that exist within it?

A simple yet effective solution is a "tree directory" view. This is a feature that doesn't exist yet, but with your vote, you could contribute towards making this feature come alive.

Here is a mockup of what a folder snapshot in tree directory format could look like:
https://ibm.box.com/s/qbvte48kglmnoe8bk53cwf79ktyr7yqs

FEATURE IDEA:
Provide ability to flag/classify files and folders in a way that allows Box to move them to a less-expensive storage offering on the back-end. This can be referred to as an "inactive" or "archive" flag.

BENEFITS & BACKGROUND

During the Box Higher Education Community Monthly Open Discussion on January 11th, an idea to submit to Box Pulse was formed, and seemed to have support from all in attendance (25-30 institutions).

Box acknowledges that there is a growing concern around constantly increasing storage, and the costs associated with it. The majority of files stored in Box are perceived (or actively reported) as being "inactive" and yet those files are costing Box and their customers the same amount. As a result, organizations are searching for alternative cost-effective solutions to move their data into. Implementing a separate solution for a subset of Box data requires significant technical, administrative, procedural, and support overhead.

Given a user or admin-driven active/inactive flag, Box could engineer their platform to use cheaper back-end storage for inactive data, and more permanent storage for active data, ultimately providing a more cost-effective service.

Administrators could be given the ability to set the parameters for what makes something an "inactive" file, and then allow end-users to tag their own content.

Allowing a view and controls around "active" vs "inactive" content, means Box could then provide X amount of "active" storage, and Y amount of "inactive" storage quota either included in the price, or for an additional fee (at better a less-expensive per TB rate). Organizations can then choose to deploy the associated quota controls and processes based on their own budget and needs for active and inactive storage.

Market opportunity -- other cloud  providers do not provide user-initiated controls for this kind of approach to data storage and management. If the providers are implementing anything like this, it is not transparent to the user. Box may have an opportunity to retain users and their data, by providing a more cost-effective glacier/cold-line/archive/inactive data storage offering, side-by-side with the rest of the Box platform.

The Box and Salesforce integration for Salesforce mobile does not support custom objects at all so we had to create a deep link workaround that redirects to the associated folder within the box mobile experience (this also requires some salesforce coding to populate a field with the corresponding folderID). This is not a seamless experience....it is a clunky redirect.

Also, you are not able to create the corresponding box folder for the first time from the mobile experience....you have to create the box folder from the desktop from within the box integration within salesforce first, before you are able to access it from mobile. This is mainly due to the the mobile box and salesforce integration not supporting custom objects out of the box.

The custom object set up for the web app is also not seamless and requires from VF and tricky setup.

I’ve created several Relay workflows across the business and the issue I found is that people are reaching out to me because my name is tied to a task that is assigned to them. Often times, I do not have any context to the workflow so it results in me having to reach out to the person who started/uploaded the document. We want to avoid approvers having to reach out to the workflow owner vs. the actual owner of the program. This process would not be sustainable if it were rolled out to a larger company.

Currently Example: Hayley creates workflow in Relay > Relay is kicked off by end-user > Box assigns an approver a task. The task is assigned by the owner of the Relay workflow - “Hayley has assigned a task to Approver.”

Proposed Example: Hayley creates workflow in Relay > Relay is kicked off by end-user/uploader > Box assigns an approver a task. The task should either read - “[End-User/Uploader] has assigned a task to Approver” OR “[Alias - People Operations team] has assigned a task to Approver.”

<improvement>
Improve zoom/enlargement in 3D file preview function

With the current 3D file preview function of Box, the display of the 3D model is small, and there is a limit to the distance that can be brought close to the 3D model even when zooming, so I would like to improve.

<Use case>
- BIM/CIM-based 3D CAD data can be easily displayed on a browser, which can be expected to improve communication with relevant parties and productivity.
- The viewer of a CAD maker has high performance and high affinity with CAD data, but it has a large burden such as device specifications, software installation labor, and subscription maintenance costs.
- Even if you do not require the functions of the viewer of the CAD maker, if you can refer to a certain 3D model with a general-purpose browser, the data expansion will be easy.