Hacker News Reader

Comment by grizzles | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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

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

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.

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.

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

+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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com