Should you use Box as a Document Management System?

Box is a popular cloud-based content management solution that companies use to manage files and collaborate on projects. In recent years, it has begun offering wider-reaching, sector-based document control solutions for its customers - but at a price.

What is the Box CCMS (Cloud-Based Content Management System)? 

Box styles itself as a cloud-based content management system since it handles diverse digital assets, including documents, web content, multimedia, and unstructured data. Unlike traditional document management platforms, it offers comprehensive content lifecycle management with real-time collaboration, workflow automation, and integration across 1,500+ applications.

Box enables organisations to securely create, share, and manage content to streamline business operations. At the same time, they can license extra tools and modules to meet the demands of life-science regulations like FDA QMSR and ISO 13485.

But is Box a document management system?

The basic Box solutions feature secure access to manage and share documents across various platforms and devices. These different packages suit different budgets.

Box offers a tiered offering for commercial clients, including: Business, Business First, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus (powered by an impressive AI engine).

At these levels Box offers helpful workflow functionality, allowing companies to quickly initiate and automate routine processes such as contract renewals, multi-user document review and onboarding activity.   

How much does Box cost?

Access to the basic business packages can be bought on a per-seat basis (with a minimum purchase of 3 seats for each package), costing between £12 and £40 per month. There are additional, unlisted costs for accessing the more sophisticated integration and governance tools.

Robust and rigorous?

But how rigorous and robust are the standard document management and collaboration solutions that Box offers?

As some startups and SMEs increasingly look to use Box and other lightweight file-sharing offerings (like Dropbox) to manage quality and product development documentation, we ask if Box is really best suited to these kind of tasks?

Is Box a long-term solution for a business with sophisticated document control needs?

Could a Box solution really help you manage all the project documentation generated by a business from conception to product launch? 

Can it help you achieve the standards of document control and proactive quality management required by ISO, the FDA or the MHRA?

It’s worth taking a further look at the pros and cons of the basic Box functionality and see how it measures up against a more heavyweight set of business requirements.

The pros and cons of using Box as a Document Management System

1. Box promises secure file sharing

Box has all the security features that you would expect of an enterprise grade solution. It uses single sign-on (through either on-premises or cloud authentication), key storage, encryption standards, and mobile device security, and it provides different levels of access based on customers' different roles and needs.

For more complex security requirements, you can buy the Box Shield add-on. This module offers advanced security measures, including content classification, threat detection, and anomaly detection, to protect sensitive data and prevent data leaks.

2. Flexible file sharing options - with limitations

Compared to sharing and collating documentation via email and storing it on a shared drive, Box is obviously a step up. With this tool users can upload documents, and invite others inside or outside an organisation to view and edit those files. Box has a full range of desk top and mobile apps, with good software integration options, that can make collaboration easy and seamless wherever you are in the world.

However, you should check carefully to ensure that the Box solution you’re choosing allows you to collaborate in real-time in shared workspaces with the specialist, design, and development software that is at the heart of your operations.

For more complex configurations and integrations, you can pay for the Box Platform module to connect content across your business apps.

3. Workflow set up

Simple workflows are easy to set up within Box. However, you can also add Box Relay (available for purchase with Business Plus and Enterprise level accounts) to support more custom processes.

Box Relay helps you streamline routine document approval and publication tasks. They are typically used to automate and simplify everyday business activities such as onboarding or contract release in a sales flow, where the review and distribution of standard documentation will follow the same sequence.

Setting up work flows in Box

In Box you can create, name and edit any number of workflows, defining required sequences of sharing, notification and approval events for the documentation you create.

However, while you can associate any new or existing workflow with a document, a workflow cannot be automatically applied to documents that you upload to specific locations in the DMS. Instead, someone choosing a workflow for a document needs to decide the ultimate destination for that file when it has completed its approval sequence.

So, it is possible for a user with the right permissions to circumvent or reinvent mandatory approval and storage sequences for specific documentation types, omitting required approvers from a workflow if they wish and creating new directory structures for files that should be handled and stored in particular ways.

For a DMS that is being created to comply with ISO 9001 and other standards, you need to be able to prove you have clear and consistent procedures in place for issuing new iterations of quality documentation. You need to ensure they are stored in one easily accessible and unchanging location, so they can be referred to by your team and any future auditors.

In practice, those who are using Box to build a QMS (Quality Management System) might need to manage the revision and approval process of a document via a Relay Workflow, then get a permissioned individual to label and upload a final, ‘locked for editing’ version of the document in the correct folder. Clearly, that is not a scalable solution for a busy and growing SME.

Likewise, within a product development process where you need to ensure documents are being grouped together and published in certain places to trigger new phases of work, it is likely that the Box workflow functionality will be inadequate to the task. It would need quite a lot of manual tinkering to achieve anything like this.

And this shouldn’t be surprising. Box Relay was never designed to support this kind of sophisticated Project Management function and therefore lacks the level of automation a good DMS can achieve in organising and controlling successive rounds of notification, feedback, approval and document release.

4. Version control features

The version control within the basic Box packages, is also not likely to help a company efficiently organise and manage the documentation crucial to a product development process.

While the collaboration tools within Box are highly flexible, the system does not automatically discriminate between ‘Drafts’ and ‘Issues’ of files that you create, meaning it is not ideal for managing critical quality, procedural or development files.

As with Google Drive and Dropbox, each time a document that is being worked on is changed, a new version is created within the system. In this way, a version history of the document is stored as the document goes through various iterations.

However, it is up to users to manage the labelling if they wish to retain a permanent record of each stage of a drafting process, as well as making the latest, ‘locked down’ approved version of the document available to view. 

In a large and sprawling product development process generating numerous iterations of multiple documents, relying on staff to always remember and apply labelling conventions for various drafts and issues, may not be realistic and runs the risk of letting ‘document anarchy’ ensue.

Instead, a Document Management System that provides for automatic labelling of iterations, allowing for the proper and discrete storage of drafts and issues, will make your business more efficient.

It will improve your ability to track and audit your processes. It will help to ensure only the most recent and up-to-date versions of your plans and designs are used by those delivering a project.

For more complex governance requirements, customers can pay for Box Governance which gives you unlimited storage of versions of documents, together with archiving and obsolescence capabilities.  These are the extra tools required for the lifecycle management demanded by regulators in the life-science industry.

5. Customer support

The more you pay, the more your support options increase.  Self-serve support is available for the most basic packages, with live support offered for those with the top-end packages.  You can pay for Box Consultants to help you with configuration - but no one-to-one support comes as standard with the basic packages.  It will be difficult to set up a QMSR-compliant document control system without accessing this help.

6. The cost

Of course, while many people think solutions like Box and Dropbox are ‘low cost or no cost’ answers to their Document Management needs, this is clearly not the case. 

You might get free storage or low cost starter packages. But if you want to access features to manage a growing business in any meaningful way, you are going to have to pay extra.  

With most of the basic packages, there are limits on API calls and file upload sizes. Native E-signatures come built in, but the number of documents that can be sent for signature through third-party and custom integrations is capped, except for those using Enterprise Plus. 

It should also be noted that Box Relay, which offers workflow functionality, is only available for purchase with Business Plus and Enterprise level accounts. This means your annual cost per user can potentially creep up to beyond $500.

Conclusion

If you are attracted to Box and similar software packages because they seem to offer quick and relatively cheap solutions to specific document management problems, it may be worthwhile taking a step back and doing a full audit of all your requirements first. 

After all, you don’t want to commit to a solution, migrate all your documents and then discover it is missing a vital piece of functionality for which you have to pay extra or change the entire way you operate.

Big corporations like AstraZeneca are currently using Box to ensure their collaboration and sales processes are streamlined and compliant.  Clients like these, with big budgets and plenty of internal development resources will be able to use Box to set up the system in exactly the way they need.  But smaller companies may find they can’t afford the level of support they want and are constantly paying extra to add seats or the specific functionality they need.  

What to start with, might look like a simple £12 - £40 per user cost may rapidly escalate into something much more unmanageable.

There is no doubt that Box is a popular and useful file-sharing and collaboration tool. However, businesses who attempt to use it as a Document Management System to support a sophisticated product development or compliance process will quickly butt up against its expensive shortcomings.