June 2018 Summaries

In the narrative, the author recounts their transformative journey from moving to Silicon Valley in 2014 for a job at Box, to experiencing an awakening moment that led to volunteering in Morocco. Initially captivated by the fast-paced and innovative environment of Silicon Valley, the author experienced personal growth but also began to lose their authentic self in the demanding lifestyle. A turning point came when they realized the toll of excessive work hours and lack of mindfulness. This realization, coupled with a forwarded email, prompted them to join a volunteer program in Morocco, focusing on women's education and empowerment. Through this experience, the author confronted personal flaws and gained a deeper understanding of global issues such as poverty and gender inequality. The trip underscored the importance of small, meaningful contributions rather than expecting to change the world as a single volunteer. The author learned valuable lessons in humility and cultural sensitivity, ultimately inspiring a commitment to create meaningful change and encourage others to give back to society.

Box Skills, unveiled at BoxWorks 2017, is an initiative designed to help businesses manage and enhance their vast amounts of content using artificial intelligence and machine learning. By integrating technologies from IBM Watson, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, Box Skills offers features such as Image Intelligence for labeling objects in images, Audio Intelligence for transcribing and identifying key topics in audio files, and Video Intelligence for face recognition and topic identification in videos. The program has expanded to include a private beta with companies like Virgin Trains and Ancestry.com, utilizing these skills for various applications, such as organizing marketing images, transcribing city council meetings, and automating insurance policy processes. Recent updates include new services for building custom skills with IBM Watson technologies and support for enhanced machine learning capabilities from Microsoft Azure, aimed at improving tasks like text detection in images and audio analysis. Box Skills aims to streamline business processes and enrich enterprise content, fostering digital transformation across industries.

IBM and Box have collaborated to introduce a new service that leverages IBM's Watson AI technologies to enhance the Box Skills framework, allowing businesses to enrich their enterprise content managed in Box and accelerate digital transformation. Utilizing the Box Skills Kit, these customizable solutions apply Watson's AI capabilities to unstructured data, transforming it into actionable information and metadata. Key innovations include custom image insights using Watson Visual Recognition, which enriches image data with classifiers for easier searchability, and custom document insights using Watson Natural Language Understanding, which tags documents with relevant metadata for improved accessibility. These tools aim to inject intelligence into business processes across industries, exemplified by applications like analyzing satellite images for environmental monitoring and tagging legal documents for quicker access to critical information. Additionally, IBM is developing custom solutions using the Box Platform APIs to apply Watson AI to various use cases, such as automated document translation, facilitating faster multinational collaboration.

Box has introduced wavectl, an open-source command line interface for Wavefront, to enhance their real-time monitoring and analytics capabilities while supporting a significant user base and an expanding microservices architecture. With the complexity and diverse monitoring needs of hundreds of microservices resulting in thousands of alerts and dashboards, Box found that while the Wavefront GUI is powerful, it is not suitable for all use cases. Wavectl complements the GUI by building on the v2 Wavefront API, allowing for easier automated interactions and offering functions like batch editing, history building, and integration with text processing tools. Box has documented several use cases for wavectl, encouraging other Wavefront power users to adopt and provide feedback on this tool.

Box's dining program, which has evolved from simple boxed lunches to an in-house cafeteria led by Executive Chef Philippe Routhier, exemplifies its commitment to fostering a culture of creativity, diversity, and inclusion. The kitchen staff, celebrated for their global culinary expertise, play a crucial role in redefining the company's culture by preparing meals with organic, sustainable, and locally sourced ingredients, and their efforts culminate in a company cookbook. This publication not only highlights the chefs' personal stories and favorite dishes but also supports the La Raza Community Resource Center's pro-bono legal services for immigrant communities in San Francisco. Professional growth is encouraged within the kitchen, as staff are trained in various culinary techniques and operations, and are also mentored by non-culinary Boxers to develop broader professional skills. The program's collaborative nature extends beyond the kitchen, allowing all employees to learn culinary skills and engage with the company's inclusive community ethos, ultimately creating an environment where every Boxer is considered a valued colleague and friend.

Steve Shimek, R&D Knowledge Management Program Director at Allergan, plays a crucial role in integrating IT systems during mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships, helping the company bring innovative medical therapies to market. With a background in computer science and technology management, Shimek focuses on managing both structured and unstructured data, recognizing the importance of intellectual property in the life sciences industry. He has implemented Box as a secure collaboration platform to replace SharePoint, enhancing data governance and accessibility for Allergan's global R&D partnerships. By establishing content governance protocols, Shimek ensures critical information is secure and well-managed. Looking to the future, he envisions advancements in medical technology through personal devices and real-time health monitoring, believing these innovations will lead to better patient care and more efficient clinical studies.

DARPA has selected Box, a cloud content management platform, to enhance its agency-wide and external research partner collaboration while adhering to stringent security and compliance standards. This decision is part of DARPA's strategy to create a more agile and connected digital workplace, aligning with the Department of Defense's cloud strategy to ensure mobile, secure access to critical resources. By adopting Box, DARPA aims to transform its research and development management, fostering greater collaboration among internal and external stakeholders and ensuring compliance with Department of Defense cybersecurity guidelines. Box, which is FedRAMP compliant and authorized by the Defense Information Systems Agency at SRG Impact Level 4, is already used by over 85,000 organizations globally, including other major U.S. government entities and corporations.

The blog post discusses the challenges of discrepancies between development and production environments, often leading to inefficiencies and bugs that occur in one environment but not the other. To address this, the authors implemented a solution using Docker containers coordinated by Kubernetes, which ensures a uniform environment across development, staging, and production by using the same image. This setup allows for quick environment resets and maintains development efficiency by using docker-machine-nfs to mount code repositories from laptops into containers. Despite initial challenges, such as slow code reflection, these were resolved by adjusting NFS parameters, enabling real-time updates with tools like nodemon. The authors acknowledge some setup complexities and minor deviations from production, such as the need for a gcc compiler and additional memory in containers, but find these outweighed by the benefits of a consistent development environment.

The Okta for Good Nonprofit Collaborative, hosted by members of the #ImpactCloud coalition, brought together over thirty nonprofit tech executives, funders, and IT community leaders in Las Vegas to foster collaboration between the tech and nonprofit sectors. The event featured a keynote by Okta CIO Mark Settle, discussions on IT modernization, digital transformation, and security, and insights from NetHope CEO Lauren Woodman on digital transformation in the nonprofit sector. A key focus was understanding the challenges nonprofit IT leaders face, such as replacing legacy tools, budget constraints, change management, and data integrity issues. The #ImpactCloud coalition aims to address these challenges by enhancing community engagement, fostering deeper connections, and developing cross-cloud platform solutions to better support nonprofit IT needs. The coalition plans to continue these efforts through events like BoxWorks and Dreamforce, with the goal of advancing the nonprofit sector's technological capabilities.

Box has announced the acquisition of the Progressly team to enhance its capabilities in creating digital workplaces, automating workflows, and transforming business processes. This move aligns with Box's long-standing mission to revolutionize information access and content collaboration, amid the exponential growth of business data and the challenges associated with managing it. The integration of Progressly's expertise will enable Box to further empower its customers by leveraging metadata and intelligence investments, while also enhancing the automation functionalities within Box through collaboration with partners like IBM, Pega, and Nintex. Box Relay, launched in partnership with IBM, exemplifies this effort by automating structured, repetitive processes to increase efficiency. The acquisition underscores Box's commitment to embedding automation in cloud content management, helping organizations transition from manual processes to more streamlined operations.

Pride@Box, one of Box's first employee resource groups (ERGs), began in late 2012 as a social and awareness group to support the LGBTQ+ community through events and discussions, despite the lack of formal policies or centralized funding at the company. Over time, both Box and the ERG have evolved, with established best practices now guiding their activities and contributing to a diverse and inclusive culture. Pride@Box, which has expanded globally with chapters in major cities, organizes recruitment events, builds community ties, and collaborates with customers and partners, while also supporting initiatives like the Box AIDS/Lifecycle Team, which raised substantial funds for HIV/AIDS support. Observing a trend of increasing corporate presence at Pride marches, Pride@Box aims to shift focus from corporate promotion to elevating LGBTQ-focused non-profit partners, leveraging Box's philanthropic efforts through Box.org. This approach is being piloted in San Francisco, with the intent to support the community more subtly and effectively.