Box enhances workflow automation

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Cloud content management company Box Inc. is revamping its workflow automation tool Box Relay, making it easier for companies to automate business processes.

The new version of Box Relay is available in Beta and will be launched in June. It features a new workflow engine, simplified user experience, and an enhanced menu of triggers, conditions, and outcomes to make it easier to automate processes around content and improve efficiency without intensive IT support.

“Enterprise workflows built around content like document reviews and approvals and employee on-boarding and off-boarding need to be reimagined. They’re disconnected from the apps teams use every day, locked behind IT, and don’t support external collaboration,” said Jeetu Patel, Chief Product Officer of Box.

“The new Box Relay brings powerful automation to improve these critical business processes, whether it’s creating sales proposals and marketing assets, or driving budget sign-offs and contract renewals, and more. Enterprises now have one platform for secure content management, workflow, and collaboration that’s built for how we work today.”

The new workflow engine provides an extensive list of ‘if this then that’ (IFTTT) triggers and outputs to support various multi-step processes, including both sequential and parallel workflows. The new Box Relay also supports conditional logic, providing the ability to route content based on metadata attributes, such as date, dropdown, multi-select, or open text fields.

External collaboration is made easier as customers, vendors or partners can be assigned tasks, so the process does not break down when content flows across or between organizations. Users can also view a list of pending tasks and receive real-time push notifications on task assignments all from their mobile device.

Support for integration with other enterprise workflow platforms includes business process systems like Salesforce, Pega and Nintex.

With the completely rewritten Box Relay, the company is trying to move beyond its main business of providing storage and content management services and become a major player in the emerging workflow market, Patel told SiliconANGLE.

“This is going to be the way workflow will get to be a mainstream market, just like we made content management a mainstream market,” Patel said.

 “These processes combine highly collaborative tasks with repeatable activities,” Patel said. “They simply don’t get done effectively today. Workflow in the enterprise as a market needs to be reimagined.”