SHAREPOINT, ONE DRIVE & BOX
From improving communication, to process consolidation and beyond. A well developed and content-rich intranet can turn your working environment into a better one.
Choosing the right cloud platform, workflow management, and communications software is important for efficiency and performance. Both Microsoft SharePoint with One Drive for Business and Box are big players in the enterprise cloud storage market. Let’s take a brief look at each their features to give you a better idea of which would work best for you.
Both companies have cloud storage around the globe, with excellent hardware and software. They’re both compatible with Mac and PC, and offer apps for iOS, Android, and Windows phones, so you can do anything from anywhere. They’re both created with security and privacy at the forefront of their design.
Your data is kept safe from everyone – that includes advertisers and One Drive, SharePoint and Box employees themselves. They both offer extensive tools for managing, monitoring and collaborating on your documents. This guide compares specific features and walks you through some of the basic tasks.
Since the two products are solutions to the same problems, let’s look at some things they don’t have in common. SharePoint offers a team site for your company’s intranet. It’s customizable but can be set up with templates very fast. Depending on your company’s set-up, you can access your team site outside your company’s network allowing you to edit your files anywhere. Another unique feature that SharePoint offers is Libraries. You can organize your documents into Libraries to share with your team. Through Libraries, you can track documents, establish workflows, and revert to previous versions. SharePoint is controlling galore for administrators. There are controls for things like user access and security monitoring. You can manage these through the Site Settings page. The site administrator can set permissions on those files to restrict access to sensitive data. Recently, SharePoint has revamped their apps to make the touch interaction user-friendly. If you still don’t like it, you can always tap the ellipsis at the bottom of the screen to switch to PC view.
Box allows you to set up single sign-on Box using Microsoft Azure Active Directory so that you’re not logging into multiple accounts to do a straightforward task. SharePoint however only requires one login for storage and Office 365 out-of-the-box. Box Notes is a feature that comes with Box. It allows you to track documents, posts, and talk to everyone who’s invited to edit those documents – all in real time. Notes are not to be confused with a SharePoint team site. A SharePoint team site is hosted on a server and is accessible from anywhere in the network. Team sites come with a customizable communications section to get company news out to everyone. It’s also a great place to host a calendar to share company events.
SharePoint calendars can be easily integrated with Microsoft Outlook so you can see all events from your Outlook calendar together with the events from the broader company calendar. SharePoint makes it easy to send events to a SharePoint calendar from an Outlook calendar.
Many people can make the mistake of not taking advantage of it even when they are already paying for it. Because of lack of information, they spend large amounts of money obtaining additional applications.
PERSONAL PLANS
One Drive is designed for personal use. You get the basic version free when you purchase Office 365, and it allows you up to 5GB of storage. From there, the plans go up to 5TB of storage. Box plans range from the free version with 10GB of storage to 100GB of storage.
ENTERPRISE PLANS
One Drive for Business is paired with SharePoint. The plans start at 1TB of storage and up to unlimited storage. They also have a plan that includes Office 365. These include phone and email support in case you have any issues. Box offers a 100GB plan of storage for small teams and unlimited users and storage. One Drive for Business provides more space with a more significant single file upload limit for the price. They have many add-ons that are available which may or may not be useful to your business.
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While both SharePoint and Box encrypt their data in storage and transit, Box has an interesting security feature called KeySafe (previously known as Box EKM). KeySafe includes 2-factor authentication wherein the customer creates the second encryption key to encrypt the key provided by Box. Then your data is encrypted with the first one. This prevents Box and anyone else from accessing your data without your permission. One Drive for Business has a similar approach that renders your data inaccessible to Microsoft employees. Microsoft likes to say, “It’s your data” – nobody moves it, changes it, or looks at it without you knowing about it. When you remove your data from the cloud, it’s gone. You don’t have to worry about anyone else getting a hold of it.
Conclusion
Microsoft SharePoint, One Drive, and Box share many of their strengths. Their SLA’s dictate 99.9 percent uptime and excellent security that allows you to maintain compliance with any application. Just storing all your company’s data in the cloud saves the hassle and expense of purchasing, managing, and securing its array of data servers. Both SharePoint and Box have integration with Office 365, document preview on over 100 file types without download, and third-party software like Salesforce. The question is what’s best for you. You can see a more in-depth comparison here. If you’re using Office 365 but also using Google apps like Google Docs a lot, there are some Box integrations you might find useful. If you have Office 365, there are some obvious pre-built integrations you should consider taking advantage of with SharePoint and One Drive.
