Tech Tips: Share, Collaborate with Duke's "Box" Service

For Jennifer Bailey, Duke's new Box service offers the perfect set of tools for storing and sharing files with co-workers in Durham and around the world.

With Box, all Duke faculty, staff and students have access to 50 GB of cloud storage space. Users can access, store and share content securely with Duke and non-Duke users — anywhere, anytime, from any device with an Internet connection.

"My challenge was always in how to share information with people in China," said Bailey, program manager for the Office of Duke Kunshan University and China Initiatives. "We had used Dropbox because it's so easy, but Box is great because it's NetID-protected and has everything Dropbox has and more."

At Duke, Box is configured to comply with all laws and regulations governing data privacy and security. Each user is responsible for ensuring their data stored or shared in Box complies with university and Duke Medicine security policies and procedures. (Visit Box Security & Usage Practices for more information.)

Here are tips to get started using Box:Upload and share large files (up to 5GB). "When I went to China for the opening of DKU, I took tons of pictures," Bailey said. "I put them up in a folder in Box so everyone could access them right away, and though the image files are large, I haven't had any issue with space."Share documents or folders with anyone inside or outside of Duke with the click of a button. Instead of exchanging documents as email attachments (and clogging up inboxes with large files), share a link to the file or folder in Box.Sync files across devices. "If I save a file to a Box folder, that will sync across devices. You don't have to save the latest version and upload, so you can be more productive," Bailey said.Collaborate with others by adding comments, assigning tasks and editing documents together. With Box, users can search the full text of online documents, track document changes with versioning, maintain conversation history by adding comments to documents, and use project management functions such as task assignments and due dates.

"I've set it up so if someone downloads or changes a document, I get an email notification so I know what's been changed, which is really helpful," Bailey said.

Box has great potential to increase productivity at Duke, said Christine Vucinich, training coordinator for Duke's Office of Information Technology.

"Box will be a great resource for the Duke community if we can build it into existing processes and procedures. There are many things we're doing now that are inefficient or that bog down our email system," she said. "We can be sharing and collaborating much more efficiently using Box."