A Lightweight Editing Tool That Is An Opening Salvo Against Microsoft Office

Therefore, Box, having moved files from the desktop to the cloud, has put itself in the position of providing document- and file-editing capabilities to companies large and small.Innocuous in itself, but important as that's been Microsoft's domain, I think, since before I was actually born. That same dominion has also been curator of Microsoft's bottom line for almost as long. Box is nibbling Microsoft's pond and I doubt that Redmond is happy. Box will happily tell you that it isn't out to get Office, but please.

I spoke to Levie and Box more generally about the tool, and they expect that a lightweight tool could be "Editor enough" for the average computing user. To quote the group, "most of today's tools have overshot customer needs to solve their problems."So, Box Notes. The goal, and I paraphrase Box here, is to avoid fitting our work to the tools that we have, and instead fit our tooling to our needs. This is implicit knocking of Word and the rest of the Office suite that has become — through time and agglomeration of new bells, whistles and buttons unknown — a bit bloated.

That's the goal of Box Notes, which is a simple real-time editing tool that combines collaborative typing with the Box file stack. If your company uses Box already, this will eventually the beta will remain small for now be an option for you and your colleagues to bang out simple documents. A feature called 'NoteHead,' think Facebook's ChatHead feature for analog, let's you see who is typing and where. It's a simple editor.Importantly, Box Notes is as compliant with security standards as Box is itself. Therefore, where you once could Box, but perhaps not use a different cloud-based file editing tool, you can now Box Notes, as well. In certain health-care and financial environments, this matters.