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Why Box and not SharePoint? 'Everybody doesn't hate us' says Box engineering veep

Cloud storage company launches Developer Edition with app-specific users

BoxDEV Box announced a Developer Edition of its cloudy storage service at its developer conference in San Francisco this week.

The name is misleading. This is not an edition for test and development, but rather a new type of Box account that lets you provision users within your application. The application calls the Box REST API to create “App users”, which do not have a Box login but can be used via your application and the API.

This means you can now build Box applications without requiring users to have a separate Box login. Everything is under application control. The Developer Edition is in closed preview.

But what is Box anyway? You may think of it as cloud storage competing with the likes of Google Drive, Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive, but Box prefers to present itself as an enterprise collaboration platform. The platform includes file upload and download, secure sharing, web-based document preview, sync with desktop files, and simple workflow for automating review and approval, or provisioning documents for new users. Documents are encrypted both in transit and at rest. Mobile platforms are supported with apps for iOS, Android, Windows, and Blackberry devices.

Box and its partners have also built industry-specific custom applications, to tailor the service for sectors including advertising, construction, education, financial services, healthcare, legal and manufacturing. Document signing is supported through partnerships, such as with Adobe EchoSign and DocuSign. Box also hooks into MDM (mobile device management) tools such as MobileIron and VMWare AirWatch, and with other cloud platforms including Salesforce and Microsoft Azure.

Box developers have two core REST APIs at their disposal. The Content API deals with files, folders, sharing, search, comments and so on, while the View API converts documents to HTML for embedding into web or mobile applications. There are SDKs which wrap the API for languages including Java, Python, PHP, .NET, Objective C and Google Chrome.

On the mobile side, Box just announced new modular SDKs for iOS, Android and Windows Phone. These SDKs include UI elements as well as non-visual API wrappers. There are four mobile SDKs, the core Content SDK, the Browse SDK for file navigation, and Share and Preview SDKs which are for iOS and Android only. The company claims more than 50,000 third-party developers make 4.5 billion API calls per month.

One thing Box does not do is to make a profit. “Right now we are focused on growing,” said CEO Aaron Levie at a conference Q&A session.

Although Box is expanding its presence in Europe, the company does not have any EU data centers. “We are exploring various options,” said a Box spokesperson, hinting that the company could start locating data in Eurozone without actually setting up its own local data center.

Why does Box run its own data centers rather than using public cloud such as AWS (Amazon Web Services) or Azure? “It’s partially customer sensitivity, not wanting to be multi-tenanted in a general-purpose cloud. Partly it is in some ways more efficient. The public clouds are pretty expensive. AWS makes a lot of money for Amazon,” says veep of engineering Sam Schillace.

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