Box Extends Google Partnership, Reveals G Suite Integration

Cloud content management company Box knows it's important to make collaboration and sharing easier between users.

To that end, the Los Altos, Calif.-based company launched the public beta of Box for G Suite integration Wednesday, an expansion to its existing partnership with Google.

"G Suite has been an amazing innovator in this space of collaborative, real-time editing, and our customers have continued to ask us to keep doing more with G Suite," said Jeetu Patel, chief product officer at Box, during his Wednesday keynote at BoxWorks 2018 in San Francisco.

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The integration with G Suite, first debuted at Google Next in July, will let G Suite users create, edit and collaborate on Google Docs, Sheets and Slides without leaving Box. Patel also introduced a similar integration between Box and Google Hangout Chat.

Box for G Suite users also will benefit from Box’s administrative controls, as well as its security, governance and compliance capabilities, according to the company.

In addition, Box revealed a soon-to-come integration with Gmail that lets Gmail users attach Box files and download email attachments to Box without leaving the Gmail interface.

"This is a pretty important moment because regardless of the collaborative editing tools you want to use, you'll be able to use all of them right from within your inbox," Patel said.

Google said it has 1.4 billion Gmail users today, and 4 million businesses are using G Suite, Google's collaboration portfolio.

The integration with Box is important to Google, too. The internet giant knows that users, especially businesses, are using a variety of collaboration products, said Ritcha Ranjan, director of product management for Google, during BoxWorks 2018.

"We want to make the workflows extremely seamless so when you're using Box you can quickly and easily use G Suite … to create and work with content," Ranjan said. "We're trying to help you save time."

Box said it will invest in new integrations and deepen the existing integrations it has today with third-party productivity and collaboration tools. The company also unveiled new integrations with Slack, Salesforce and DocuSign.

The company said Box for G Suite integration is now available in public beta. Box integration with Gmail is slated to be generally available later this year.