Facebook might not be the most business-friendly social media platform, but it has certainly managed to change the way business does business. Box.net is taking a page right out of the Facebook; um book, to enhance their collaboration and content management platform. Box.net’s CMS features communication, file sharing and version control options for their users. Soon, the company will add newsfeed to that list as well.
In an effort to stay relevant and to ensure that information is properly and exhaustively dispersed throughout the social media pipeline, Box.net is adding a newsfeed feature to syndicate information. “It’s hard to connect the right people with the right information,” says Box.net’s CEO Aaron Levie. The newsfeed feature is designed to make it “easy for businesses to share information with anyone, anywhere.”
Box.net’s content management suite, as explained by Jake Widman from Information Week, “falls in the vast middle space between simple shared, synced storage like Dropbox at one end, and complex, high TCO offerings like Microsoft SharePoint at the other.”
The great thing about adding a newsfeed feature is that it will cast a wider audience net while still connecting the right people with the right information. As Levie explains, adding a newsfeed would “expose information in relevant and intuitive ways.”
The newsfeed would provide a steady stream of information that is more dynamic than information being dispersed through an email, which is so passé. The newsfeed can also be updated anytime, anywhere. “It drives relevant activities and surfaces them to users,” says the Box.net CEO.
With Box.net’s success in the past year and new collaboration tools, the cloud-computing enterprise is proving to be a serious threat to its CM providing counterparts, ahem, Microsoft. Also, since the newsfeed is on an open platform, Box.net partners can access the newsfeed and contribute as well. Box.net is anticipating that utilization of the newsfeed will go up five times over the next year.