LOS ALTOS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Box (NYSE: BOX) today announced Box for Education, bringing tailored solutions and partnerships to the education industry. The company also unveiled a new unlimited storage offering for higher education institutions that adopt Box through the Internet2 NET+ initiative, which helps U.S. universities speed deployment of cloud technologies. Box’s content collaboration platform powers the secure content sharing and management for more than 150 global universities like Penn State, Utah State University, Emerson College, St. Edward's University, Lancaster University and the University of Dundee.

“Educational institutions understand that the cloud offers innovative ways to increase collaboration throughout their community, modernize teaching and ultimately cuts down on IT costs,” said Whitney Bouck, general manager of enterprise at Box. “By expanding our education partner ecosystem and offerings, we will better meet the needs of our customers and enable more functionality for students, faculty and staff using Box to create learning materials, share research, manage classrooms and communicate in a secure environment.”

Box for Education will help education institutions:

• Develop custom departmental workflows to speed up collaborative processes;
• Create workspaces that facilitate new ways of connecting and learning; and
• Reduce risk and simplify the governance of end-user IT.

“Our IT group is focused on improving teaching, learning, research and University operations with technologies that enable better cross-functional collaboration, workflow and communication," said Eric Hawley, associate vice president for IT and CIO at Utah State University. "With Box, we were able to bring a secure collaboration tool to our community and empower them with seamless access to their most important information, increasing the level of remote collaboration, participation and teamwork.”

Unlimited Storage for Higher Education Institutions

Today, Box announced unlimited storage for higher education institutions that adopt Box through Internet2 NET± (NET+). Unlimited storage enables students, faculty, and staff to leverage Box for even more creative uses across the institutions without concern for limits or quotas. Since the launch of the program in April 2012, more than 100 campuses, including Stanford University, Yale, University of California Berkeley, University of Michigan, Indiana University, Cornell and Georgetown have adopted Box. Leading technologists from Internet2 member institutions have also worked closely with Box to shape features and functionality to meet the needs of the research and education community.

“Research and education organizations across the nation are calling for access to solutions that aid student engagement, enable multi-departmental and institutional collaboration while also meeting the digital storage needs of students, faculty and staff and the sector’s increasingly stringent security requirements,” said Shelton Waggener, senior vice president at Internet2. “Real partnerships that bring the research and education community together with industry-leading cloud technology providers like Box is at the heart of NET+. Today, NET+ Box is allowing our community to work together in new ways while expanding the potential for technology to benefit education and beyond.”

Education Partners

Box is committed to working with an ecosystem of partners to provide innovative technology solutions that modernize the classroom experience. Education platform partners include leading learning management systems (LMS) and education applications like Canvas by Instructure, Celly and Fluid Notes. Box also works with an ecosystem of security, governance and compliance partners to provide the most trusted services for universities as they manage their content in the cloud.

In late April, Box teamed up with Google to release Box for Chrome OS - an app that provides the ability to bypass the browser on a Chromebook and access your Box files directly from the Chrome OS File Manager. Leading higher education institutions like Indiana University and Cornell are leveraging this app to get work done more seamlessly on Chromebooks. With the app, students, faculty and staff can access presentations, research and theses stored within Box directly on their device without opening a browser tab.

Box is also announcing a new integration with Blackboard Collaborate, a simple, convenient, and reliable online collaborative learning solution. The new partnership leverages the Box View API, which enables learning management systems to redefine teacher and student workflows with seamless, beautiful document viewing and annotation experiences. Now, when educators want to present content to students with Blackboard Collaborate, they can easily convert materials through Box without downloading or installing anything to be displayed in the web browser or on mobile devices within the Collaborate session.

In a continued effort to expand its reach into higher education institutions globally, Box has recently partnered with two more of the world’s leading research and education networks, GÉANT and AARNet, extending and strengthening Box's presence in Europe and Australia. Through its partnerships with GÉANT and AARNet, Box provides customers with a solution that allows students, staff and faculty to easily share documents, presentations and content they use every day. These new additions compliment Box’s existing global networking consortium partners in the education space, which include Jisc, SURF, NORDUnet and Internet2.

Product Capabilities for Higher Education

Box recently released several new product enhancements to help higher education institutions more easily access content and securely collaborate on sensitive data: Box Notes, Box Governance and Box Enterprise Key Management (EKM). In early September, Box will also be releasing new granular controls for Box Groups to help admins better control access to sensitive information.

Pricing and Availability

Pricing of the Internet2 NET+ Box service is based on the size of the institution. The service is available for both Internet2 member and non-member Universities. More information can be found here.

For more information on today’s announcement, visit the Box blog.

Learn more about Box for Education at www.box.com/education.

To hear how innovative companies across industries are using technology to transform their business, join us at BoxWorks 2015, September 28 – 30 in San Francisco www.box.com/boxworks/.

About Box

Founded in 2005, Box (NYSE: BOX) is transforming the way people and organizations work so they can achieve their greatest ambitions. As the world's leading enterprise software platform for content collaboration, Box helps businesses of all sizes in every industry securely access and manage their critical information in the cloud. Box is headquartered in Los Altos, CA, with offices across the United States, Europe and Asia. To learn more about Box, visit www.box.com.