Cloud content management software company Box Inc. today announced the general availability of its Box Hubs feature, enabling customers on its enterprise plans to create intelligent portals that make it easier for users to organize, curate and publish content.
The aim is to enable easier access in internal teams and with external partners. Box Hubs is tightly integrated with Box AI, the company’s suite of generative artificial intelligence tools that help to make workers more productive.
The new feature has been a long time coming, as it was first announced at the company’s Boxworks event in October 2023, when it launched in beta test access. At the time, Box stressed that Box Hubs is all about organizing content and making it available in one place for relevant teams. It provides users with the tools they need to create and publish content internally in a secure way without requiring information technology resources or hours of user training.
As an example, workers will be able to create a new Box Hub without the assistance of any IT administrators, simply by selecting all of the files they want to go inside it. Then they can customize their Hub with a header, images and icons, descriptive information about what’s inside it, and more.
New content can be added to a Box Hub at any time, organizing it into easy-to-read content that can be published and made available to select teams without having to move that file from its current folder. Whenever content is moved into a Box Hub, it will retain the same file permissions, ensuring only desired audiences can access it. The Hubs themselves are being made available through a new Hubs Gallery within the Box application, eliminating the need for workers to search through various folders to find the Hub they want.
According to the company, Box Hubs can be used by human resources teams to publish content such as their company’s handbook, 401(k) plans and other information that’s relevant to employees. Sales enablement teams could create a Hub that contains their corporate pitch, buyer personas, discovery questions and so on.
Meanwhile, brand teams can create a Hub that contains ready-made templates, images and logos, while marketing teams might want to create a Hub for specific campaigns. Product teams can also use Hubs for each specific product they’re working on, where they’ll store its roadmap, specifications, organization charts, quarterly planning processes and more.
With the launch in general availability, Box Hubs is now available for all Box customers on Enterprise plans and above. Customers on the Box Enterprise plan, the highest tier, will also be able to leverage Box AI within Box Hubs, with unlimited end-user queries.
The combination of Box Hubs and Box AI could prove to be a real game-changer in terms of productivity. With it, users will be able to ask questions that pertain specifically to the content within a particular Hub, so they can get immediate answers, status updates or summaries based on the information relevant to the task they’re working on.
In an interview with SiliconANGLE last year, when Box Hubs was first announced, Box Chief Executive Aaron Levie gave the example of a company that manufactures jet engines. It could create a Hub containing thousands of documents about a specific engine. Users would then be able to ask questions relating to that product, such as “How much does it cost in Japan?” or “How many engines have been sold to Japanese customers?”.
“Content is where the greatest upside is for generative AI,” Levie said at the time.
Of course, users will also be able to create new content, and locate it directly within a Box Hub, the company said.
Box Chief Product Officer Diego Dugatkin said Box Hubs will help increase collaboration among teams while ensuring their content remains secure. He said a lot of Box’s customers have reported that it can be challenging for them to organize and publish critical information and make it accessible to the right people, both inside and outside of their organizations. So that’s exactly what Box Hubs enables.
Box has added new features to Box Hubs with its general release. For instance, users can now share Hubs externally with partners, agencies, contractors and vendors, providing secure access to their curated content.
It’s also possible to search for Hubs and specific files within a Hub using Box’s global search tools. There are also new features such as being able to send a link for a specific Hub to another user, and the ability to add bookmarks within a Hub. Also, Box Hubs now meets certain federal compliance standards, including Section 508, the company said.
Box discussed how a number of customers have already been using Box Hubs with great success while it was available in early access. They include a professional services firm, which created a Hub for industry-specific customer stories, positioning statements and competitive analyses. One of the main advantages for that company was that it could use Box AI to find valuable insights when creating new pitches and talking to customers.
In another example, Box said a hospitality business created a Hub where it was able to centralize and organize its legal documents, so it could quickly access Box AI insights to streamline compliance management. Meanwhile, a marketing agency created a Hub with ready-made templates, images and logos, providing everything its employees needed to create a new ad campaign in one place, where it’s easier to find.
Moor Insights & Strategy analyst Mel Brue said the single biggest advantage of Box Hubs is its potential to save time.
“Employees lose countless hours each week searching for the information they need,” he explained. “Box aims to solve this with Box Hubs, allowing users to curate critical content and leverage AI-powered search and summarization. It should make content more accessible, increasing its value to organizations.”