Box Adds HTML5 Framework, Embeds Cloud Content Management in 3rd-Party Apps

Aiming to further cement its place as a provider of cloud-based unified content governance, Box today unveiled a new offering: Box Embed. The HTML5 embeddable framework gives partners and developers the capability to embed Box’s content and collaboration capabilities in business applications.

“Content is critical to every application that businesses run on,” says Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box. “By extending Box’s enterprise content and collaboration across today’s leading business applications, Box is transforming the way people and organizations access, share and manage their business information in the cloud. We’re making it incredibly simple for our partners and developers to leverage the power of Box from within their services, and to provide a central content layer for enterprise productivity.”

Box Embed delivers all of Box’s collaboration and management features into partner and customer applications, including file preview, comments, tasks and search. Chris Yeh, vice president of Platform at Box, notes that it also allows Box to integrate anywhere users need to access content on the web, including intranets, extranets, forums, wikis and blogs.

He adds that these capabilities will allow organizations to choose best-of-breed tools for their employees without worrying about content integration.

“It used to be that you’d have an Oracle stack or an IBM stack [of business software],” Yeh says. “But that world seems to be changing a lot these days. Increasingly, we are seeing people able to buy best-of-breed products in various areas to deploy to their employees. Out of the gate, they are usually way easier to use for users. They are products that users genuinely like to use.”

The downside, he says, is that choosing best-of-breed applications over a unified stack generally means expensive integration is required to enable federated content governance. Box is enabling that capability for free through its Box Embed framework.

“It’s easy and you don’t have to pay millions to a third-party integrator,” he says. “You can embed it anywhere that people are working.”

10 Partners Join Forces with Box

Ten enterprise software companies have announced partnerships with Box through which they will use Box Embed to make Box capabilities available as the content management layer of their software. The partners are Concur, Cornerstone OnDemand, DocuSign, Eloqua, FuzeBox, Jive, NetSuite, Oracle, SugarCRM and Zendesk.

“The core transaction driving business and personal productivity is collaboration around information, data and documents,” says Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite. “By integrating the entire Box service with NetSuite, built using NetSuite’s SuiteCloud Computing Platform, our customers have a secure, centralized content experience streamlining business productivity.”

Yeh notes that Box Embed shares 95 percent of the code in the core Box web application, which means that new additions to the core web application should quickly be made available through Box Embed as well.

“When we’re making changes to the code core, they are reflected back really well,” he says.

Box Embed is immediately available at no cost for NetSuite and SugarCRM. Yeh says the other partners will make Box Embed available in their applications in the next quarter.

Thor Olavsrud covers IT Security, Big Data, Open Source, Microsoft Tools and Servers for CIO.com. Follow Thor on Twitter @ThorOlavsrud. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline and on Facebook. Email Thor at tolavsrud@cio.com