Box.net vs DropBox

The popular online file sharing service DropBox finally launches a version for business - DropBox for Teams. It differs from the regular DropBox by two things. First, it has an administrative panel to manage users and access rights. In the admin panel you can also pay for all business users. Second, when sharing files inside DropBox for Teams account, the free disk space is not decreased. (In the regular DropBox version if somebody shares for example 100 MB file to you, your disk space is reduced by 100 MB). However, DropBox wants business version users not to think about the free space at all. DropBox for Teams provides at least 1TB of free space. This is 2 times bigger than in the business version of the main competitor - Box.net

A couple of years ago it was funny to watch the cheeky advertising by Box.net, in which the startup attacked the giant SharePoint. But it turned out that Box.net can not only do a noisy PR, but also can effectively run its business and develop the high-quality product. This week the company raised another $81 million of investments from SAP and Salesforce, and its market value was estimated at $600 million. Box.net currently has 100 thousand customers (7 million users). 77% of Fortune 500 companies use Box.net. And this summer the startup succeeded in signing its biggest contract - with Procter & Gamble for 18,000 seats. Box.net is the mobile collaboration market leader according to Forrester. So what is the secret of their success?

Box.net CEO, Aaron Levy, came up with a new beautiful term "Smart Enterprise". Aaron opposes it Benioff's "Social Enterprise", hinting that a company (and business applications) in result should smart rather than social. And the main goal of business application is not to connect person to person but to connect person to needed content. So in general, all this stuff is quite abstract and unclear, but it sounds good and perfectly fits into Box.net mission - to provide a single, centralized cloud content repository for Enterprise. Box.net wants to integrate content from all (isolated) business applications, computers, mobile devices, offices to ensure that each employee can access the right content at the right time. To achieve this, Box.net has released two major components: Box for Microsoft Office and Box Sync.

Forrester Research, the technology and market research company decided to create a report on the mobile collaboration market. Why mobile? After all, there are no purely mobile collaborative solutions. Mobile access - is just a feature in such systems. But apparently, this feature has become so important that it deserves a separate report. So the results of Forrester research - on the chart. The results - are quite strange. For example, Google (which provides the cool mobile access to almost all their services) is behind the most leaders. And Microsoft - is absent (while it's new department Skype has the best mobile strategy). But the chart leader - Box.net is really showing the great progress in recent months.

Next week Microsoft will officially launch its online office suite Office 365, and of course, the major competitors, Google and Box.net, want to spoil this party. First, they have integrated their solutions. Now Box.net users can edit any stored document in the Google Docs online editors. In addition, they can (in just one click) create new documents in Box.net folders by opening Google Docs apps. Recall that Box.net also features the similar integration with Zoho Docs, so now users will have a choice. Box.net CEO, Aaron Levy, says that he played with the beta version of Office 365 and that it’s lacking the power and functionality of the bunch Box + Google Docs.

Last week, Amazon launched the new online file storage service Amazon Cloud Drive. And taking into account reputation of Amazon, as the online storage market leader, this event, of course, deserves our attention. Let's consider the advantages and disadvantages of this service compared to key competitors. The main parameters - are shown in the table (below). It's turns out that the main advantage of Amazon Cloud Drive - if free 5GB account  with maximum file size of 2GB. However, its main drawback negates this advantage: you can not share this large file with anyone. Amazon Cloud Drive doesn't allow to share files publicly or protected by password. I.e. the only way of using this service - is a private storage for backup or enhancing your productivity.

As known, Box.net always positioned itself as a Sharepoint alternative. The entire marketing strategy of Box.net has been built on Sharepoint criticism. They created billboards criticizing Sharepoint, distributed T-shirts with the sign "No Sharepoint", collected negative reviews about Sharepoint in Twitter, etc. But business - is business. And Sharepoint - is Sharepoint. This is perhaps the most successful IT system over the last several years. And it's linked to so many others business applications that persuading a company to change Sharepoint to something else - is unreal. So Box.net accepted this fact and came up with the new strategy: now Box.net will be the front-end to Sharepoint. And also to others ECM systems.

In this case by "Dropbox for Enterprise" we don't mean the business version of Dropbox. The fact is that the expression "Dropbox for Enterprise" has become a new meme. The largest enterprise software vendors want to release a product under the label "Dropbox for Enterprise". That's how they say: "We want to create something like Dropbox for Enterprise" (watch the video). Recall, Dropbox - is the super-popular file syncing and sharing service, which has already attracted 50 million users thanks to its simplicity and multi-platform support. It's business usage is limited due to the strict corporate security standards. But employees still tend to use it bypassing IT admins, and that is why the enterprise vendors are standing in the line to become the Enterprise Dropbox provider.

The popular online file sharing service DropBox finally launches a version for business - DropBox for Teams. It differs from the regular DropBox by two things. First, it has an administrative panel to manage users and access rights. In the admin panel you can also pay for all business users. Second, when sharing files inside DropBox for Teams account, the free disk space is not decreased. (In the regular DropBox version if somebody shares for example 100 MB file to you, your disk space is reduced by 100 MB). However, DropBox wants business version users not to think about the free space at all. DropBox for Teams provides at least 1TB of free space. This is 2 times bigger than in the business version of the main competitor - Box.net

Recently we wrote about to leading file collaboration services - DropBox and Box.net. Now it's time to add to this short list one more tool - SugarSync. During the last few months this service added some very important features: good version control system, free 2Gb subscription plan, iPhone and Android apps and the suitable file sending feature. And yesterday they unveiled business accounts that enable to administrate up to 100 user accounts - the feature that is much expected from DropBox. Besides the ability to create/delete user accounts, administrator can set storage limits for each user (and receive alerts when user is near limit) and easily scale the whole company storage volume. And of course, all payments are centralized.

DropBox and Box.net - are, probably, the most popular and successful online file sharing and collaboration services. And though they use two different approaches to the SaaS file storage, they both have alike strategy, supposing constant upgrades and new features development. During the recent months both services did a good job and it's interesting to compare their results.