Teambox Bundles Box Storage With Social Collaboration

Teambox is announcing a deal with Box to promote how the two products can be used together.

Teambox, a social collaboration tool geared to organizing team projects, announced file sharing integrations with Box, Dropbox and Google Docs in August, saying its collaboration environment could be a unifying hub for teams using several of those tools. That's proven popular with small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and some departmental customers, said Teambox CEO Dan Schoenbaum. On the other hand, organizations trying to standardize on one cloud file-sharing tool across the enterprise tend to gravitate to Box because of its emphasis on security and auditing capabilities, he said. Now, they will get 15 gigabytes of free storage per user to propel them down that path.

"More and more, we're hearing from CIOs that they're comfortable with the consumerization of IT" represented by these cloud services, as long as they don't feel they are "losing control of their data," Schoenbaum said. "A lot of them will trust us, but they'll say, 'we need auditing and compliance reporting and deeper security' -- which is what Box is great at."

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Although Teambox's press release promotes the deal as a "bundling" of the Box service, it's more of a promotional bundle than a technical one. Teambox does not automatically provision Box storage to go with Teambox accounts. Instead, as part of the deal, Box established a signup page with the special offer for Teambox users.

Once a Box account is established, Teambox users can link it to their accounts and enable two-way file sync between Box and Teambox. Although Teambox offers its own file storage, enterprise customers tend to value features that are stronger in Box, while Teambox offers a more complete collaboration environment than they can get through Box alone, Schoenbaum said.

Teambox cites customers like BP, World Bank, Groupon, Southwest Airlines and University of Arizona as its biggest clients and specifically pointed to EMI Music as a client taking advantage of the Teambox-Box bundle. According to the press release, EMI has been using Teambox as a more flexible alternative to SharePoint for project collaboration, while it turned to Box as a way of ensuring better security for cloud file storage.

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