Box updates bring collaboration and security improvements for remote workers

Box Shield security

Box has revealed a slew of integrations and updates designed to help users manage and secure their workflows from anywhere.

The new features include integrations with Apple and Microsoft Teams, collaboration updates, and some new security and compliance settings within Box Shield.

Revealing the updates at the company's BoxWorks conference, CEO Aaron Levie said that it has never been more challenging for enterprises to both secure their data and keep up with the pace of business.

"Our vision has always been to provide a central source of truth for your content in the cloud," sai Levie. "At BoxWorks Digital, we're enhancing that vision with innovation that will make it incredibly easy to collaborate on a single platform that's secure, simple to use, easy to manage, and that extends to all the apps your teams use every day."

Earlier in the year, Box introduced a feature that allowed users to create annotations in the Box web app. As of Thursday, this feature is now also available on iOS and fully supports the Apple Pencil. With it, users can highlight text and images, or leave a comment on the preview of a document.

Box has also expanded its integration with Microsoft Teams with users able to choose a Box folder to be synced automatically with a Microsoft Teams chat group. Users can also instantly grant access to Box files from within Teams and receive Box notifications related to content activity.

With more emphasis on remote working, Box has also updated some security and compliance protocols within its automated security hub, Box Shield. It starts with a new policy exception feature, which must be opted-into at corporate level. It allows employees to suggest policy exceptions by providing a business justification, which is then recorded for auditing purposes. This is expected to be made available to Box Shield customers sometime next year.

The company is also adding event-based retention to its content lifecycle management toolset. With this, users will be able to retain and migrate files for a configurable amount of time depending on their business needs. This includes changing schedules for the migration of files after a client account is closed, a contract expires, or an employee leaves the company.

Bobby Hellard

Bobby Hellard is ITPro's Reviews Editor and has worked on CloudPro and ChannelPro since 2018. In his time at ITPro, Bobby has covered stories for all the major technology companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, and regularly attends industry-leading events such as AWS Re:Invent and Google Cloud Next.

Bobby mainly covers hardware reviews, but you will also recognise him as the face of many of our video reviews of laptops and smartphones.