Google and Box Announce Partnership | Hacker News Reader

Google and Box Announce Partnership

googleforwork.blogspot.com

130 pointsakrolsmir61 comments

We use Google and Box for work at a 100 person Series C startup.

Searching across all the locations for my files is a disaster : - one Local files on my work laptop (mostly synced via dropbox), - two Box (mostly in their web UI, with ~2 folders being "synced" locally), - three Google Drive (shared and authored files a like), - four Email, - five Slack, - six Files stuck in our business systems (like contracts that sit in Salesforce.com, Jira, etc)

It's an absolute mess. I can't imagine I'm the only one to be annoyed and losing productivity.

If you are looking for seamless integration, you need to buy into an ecosystem. An ecosystem that offers all/most of these pieces of software and integrates them well. Obviously, not a lot of ecosystems exist that offer all these pieces.

Based on your apps list (Box, Drive, Email, Slack, Salesforce), there are two ecosystems that offer alternatives to all these apps - Microsoft & Zoho (I am with Zoho). Google is also in the mix if you add apps from Google Apps Marketplace.

So there are two options. 1) Pick an integrated ecosystem and integrate missing apps. 2) Pick independent apps and integrate all of them

You clearly are doing #2 and experiencing the challenges. It is only going to get exponentially worse as you add more apps into the mix.

Google used to have this thing called Google Desktop Search[1]. It gave you complete desktop search, but could plug other things in too.

It was completely awesome. Google canned it of course, though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop

Sounds like we need a startup to connect the services of all these other startups together.

But then some companies won't play ball with their own storage services e.g. iCloud.

There's nothing unique about iCloud, so just go with another provider that's less awful?

Then just reverse their official apps and call the same API yourself

https://www.meta.sc

www.docuvo.com. Connects platforms and let's you do full text search with full visuals

www.zapier.com

If you use Google for email, #3 and #4 should both be searched from Gmail. Perversely Gmail's search UI is better and faster for Docs than the one built into Docs.

For the general problem, could all these searches be integrated into Mac's Spotlight system?

There are companies that solve exactly that. Xendo and Synata are the two I know. They've both been acquired earlier this year.

at least for your local files, give "everything"[1] a try. While it doesn't allow searching inside files, as long as you know the name you'll find it instantaneous.

[1]https://www.voidtools.com/

Windows only. Love it on my windows machines though, wish there was an analog for Mac/Linux

Why not just Google Drive (instead of Box)?

Compliance, strong orientation towards folder hierarchy (maybe it's just me), + Drive is pretty rough unless you use it to author the files also...

MS Office files (Excel, Word, PPT), saved in their original format, aren't amazing in Drive.

Would keeping everything locally and use the "cloud" only for backups be an option?

Box has always promoted this notion that you can make applications/addons/extensions that use Box as a backing datastore [1]. This was quite obviously a play at the B2B line-of-business market, which could conceivably develop cloud-hosted apps [2] that operate on data that employees upload into Box.

This is to the detriment of those who sell traditional desktop-based line-of-business apps, including potentially Microsoft Office.

Box could -- for a while now -- open Google Docs documents [3][4] and the like. I guess now it works the other direction, where Google Docs works on files that are sitting in Box?

Google Drive, as funny as it sounds, is actually in a different market: they're the catch-all storage space for Google stuff, while at the same time marketed at nothing in particular. Meanwhile Box aggressively goes after the 'medium business' market. From this odd partnership, a realistic competitor to Microsoft and other office-y application makers may result.

[1] http://readwrite.com/2013/06/06/box-pay-developers-based-on-...

[2] https://app.box.com/services/browse/57

[3] https://blog.box.com/blog/how-to-use-google-docs-in-box/

[4] https://blog.box.com/blog/box-and-google-docs-accelerating-t...

I like Aaron Levie too. But my thoughts on this can be summarized by quoting one of the responses to the blog post:

    Why use Box and not just use Drive?

Speaking personally, and not on behalf of my organisation where I deployed Box (5000+ seats), the additional enterprise controls are one of the reasons Box is superior to some other file sync and share solutions. It's also stand-alone, meaning by using Box you're not committing yourself to a path towards email, docs, hangouts, etc. A lot of Google and Microsoft's value-add capabilities come if you use all of their products. If you want a stand-alone solution (which sometimes has a more focused product), Box and Dropbox are the main contenders from an enterprise perspective. Hightail also potentially.

Google drive is terrible for shared directory structures. it's not that box is better than drive, everyone is better than drive at organizing files

+1 for drive having the worst organization of all doc tools currently in existence.

Give me a windows remote shared directory, a sharepoint, a dropbox, just anything that would let me work.

Drive is only good at making a single isolated file and sharing that file over gmail.

It is lacking notions of structured and shared folders. No thought was given to sharing documents across the company/teams/services, EXCEPT to make a single document sent by email.

I don't get why you simply can't list all of the folders that are shared with the entire Google Apps domain.

I'm fed up with complex director y hierarchies. Namespaces are cool and all, but flat is better than nested.

Drive is needlessly complex. On my laptop I have folder structures. In zip files and tarballs you have structure. You even get hierarchy in a CD.

Trying to find your way around Drive (esp. when sharing between enterprises) is a nightmare for me. Google could cement some really good mindshare if they made shared folders/docs more intuitive.

Flatness can result in much more overwhelming complexity.

I suppose that depends on what you mean by complexity. I prefer lists to trees, in general. After I reorganized my Dropbox into only 1 layer of folders, I've found it much easier to navigate. But hey, that's just my anecdote.

Yes +1 Google drive is terrible for organising files in folders. And when multiple people share files with you daily if becomes even worse. I have given up on it.

Now I just use search, which works most of the time, especially if I remember at least one word in the file title. But sometimes relevancy and order of search results seems to screwed up.

At a company of any size, with compliance and complex sharing requirements, and advanced search and workflow needs, Drive is a non-starter.

Posting evidence of this would be useful, because Drive is pretty comprehensive in terms of compliance. Also not sure what you mean by "workflow needs". Why would you use a file storage service to manage workflows in the first place?

Because most workflows involve some kind of document. Automatically routing that document to different people and standardizing the way they interact with it can be very beneficial.

Wouldn't that what the Drive API can be used for? I may be answering my own question here, but I imagine that would be the most useful part of this Box/Drive partnership. :D

> Why would you use a file storage service to manage workflows in the first place?

Person A can only read document X because they are performing duty b on project y.

Not everything works with binary can/can't read scenarios.

> Person A can only read document X because they are performing duty b on project y.

How is this _not_ a binary can/can't read scenario? The person can either read it because they're performing the duty, or can't ready it because they're not.

It's not binary because they should only be able to read it while performing duty b. There needs to be something that enables/disables access when they start/stop working on it, or checks access before the read it.

I'm working at a 10000+ employee, 1B+ revenue corp and G-Drive is the standard filesystem on the corp computers.

I was. if you have a plenty of files, how could you search something in a specific folder? e.g. I want to search 'hadoop' in my personal work notes, not in public ebooks and slides.

That's frightening.

I would suggest your security team do an audit with CloudLock (note, we acquired them at Cisco) and my guess is that it'll be illuminating / shocking.

How do you manage the syncing of presumably a huge amount of data amongst many groups?

The company I work at has gotten around these restrictions with AODocs. It adds a lot of enterprise features Drive is missing (workflow setup, version control, etc.). It works well for us, but it's still by no means a perfect solution.

Basically, as I understand it based on a few talks given by Aaron, Box will bend over backwards to make sure Box fits in your org, including adding new features. Drive comes with Google's famous customer support.

Box is handholding per-client, Drive is "fuck you" level customer service.

Drive has many reliability issues at a scale of over a few thousand files [1]. Perhaps Box is more reliable?

[1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/drive

Yep. I have 5000+ files in Box. We have users with far more (and it supports very large file sizes -- 15GB I think today?).

Sync client has improved quite a bit over the years.

At my day job we are asked to use Box (enterprise), and while it is ok (not great, but not totally awful) as a solution for sharing/distributing files for both internal and external recipients (avoiding those emails with huge attachments)...It absolutely sucks at searching for your files. I starting using tags - similar to Gmail's excellent labels - with the hopes of finding my files without getting a ton of irrelevant stuff...but no dice. Searching for files in Box still so often brings up irrelevant files as to be counter-productive. Again, Box has its benefits, but point blank, search is broken within Box...which means for my team and I to find things we can not depend on search (or tags/labels)...which means we have to depend on old school folder hierarchies; and all the potential downsides that it brings. My hope is this partnership DOES bring some of google's search prowess into the Box product.

I seem to regularly have problems with Gmail's searching. Searching for an email composed and sent on a device other than the one you're using to search is a crap shoot. I don't know if it's sync issues but I've had a lot of trouble trying to find emails I know I sent only to open another device and find them.

I have not had that experience. However i will state thaT what really augmented my searching within gmail (both from desktop and mobile) is using the search operators. Admittedly i only use 2 or 3 of them, but even just those few provide so much power in really filtering down to the relevant emails. Check out the following reference: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en

I had read an older version of this, but i'm sure this version will suffice to help you. Good luck!

Have you made sure that your devices are putting emails sent from them in the right folder?

I had this issue for a while and it turned out that my phone made it's own "Sent" folder in addition to Gmail's existing one, which completely screwed up search.

I only use the Gmail app on Android and the web interface.

I have not had that problem, but I use Gmail natively on all devices--i.e. on my iPhone I use Google's Gmail app instead of Mail. On my Macs I log into Gmail in the browser instead of using Apple Mail.

Perhaps that's why the pragmatic programmer book was so big on text files for everything. Even if all you have is grep and find they'll work.

It'll be interesting to see what Dropbox does in response to this. Box has always been the "business" solution, but partnering up with Google positions Box better to build on this. I feel like this is really bad news for Dropbox who has been trying to get into the business market, but are clearly failing.

IPO once and for all?

Box? Yes. Dropbox? Eh.

Interesting! Why not Dropbox? How might this impact Google Drive?

I think Dropbox is drifting towards Microsoft (which is not a bad thing I think). They're collaborating with MS Office.

So are Box: https://www.box.com/partners/microsoft

It drives me nuts to read an announcement regarding $some_product when they don't spend a single word on explaining what the hell $some_product actually is. What the hell Google PR???

disclaimer: I work at Google :|

Is this star of the end of Google Drive?

Sort of thought that anything you put in Drive belongs to or can be used by Google according to their TOS. Correct me if I am wrong but that is the main reason no rational business would ever connect anything to Google if they can avoid doing so.

I believe if you purchase Google Apps (like most businesses would) the TOS are different.

EDIT: In case any one is curious, this page links to both: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2450387?hl=en

The content doesn't belongs to Google and the permissions granted are the standard for any service that displays or modifies the content.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com