by Barry Murphy
The Enterprise File Sync and Share (EFSS) category is hot right now. This is not a surprising fact. In the research document Parting Enterprise Users From Consumer EFSS Solutions Will Be a Challenge, Gartner estimates that, “by 2018, 50% of an enterprise’s data will reside external to the data center.” EFSS vendors provide enterprises with more structured ways to collaborate and share information both on-premise and in the cloud. The Gartner document goes on to state that, “an off-premises public cloud implementation of EFSS can help an organization isolate data from its data center and simplify easy sharing of information assets to individuals outside the firewall and located across multiple regions.” For these reasons, EFSS vendors like Box are growing rapidly and gaining large enterprise customers.
Obviously, if half of an enterprise’s data will reside external to the data center, then half will still live within the data center or locally on users’ machines. No matter where data is being stored, though, the fact remains that the ability to search that data will be critically important. Workers still demand unified access to their most important information assets, and they want a highly intuitive search experience with fast-as-you-type search results regardless of where the data lives. In other words, users require business productivity search. X1, with the Box connector, provides just that in a way that not only pleases users, but also gives IT a lot of flexibility.
With X1’s Box Connector, users can now add Box accounts as data sources, and search emails, files, SharePoint, and now Box content in a single-pane-of-glass.
Not only do users get a single interface in which they can search across all of their critical content, but they also get all of the benefits that simply come with X1 – fast-as-you-type search results, full-fidelity document preview, and post-search actions (PSAs). In the case of Box content, the PSAs are valuable because they are specific to things users would normally do within Box. For example, directly in the X1 interface, users can elect to send a document as an attachment or as a link.
In addition, users can integrate Box more directly into their personal workflows because X1 will allow a PSA on content from other data sources (e.g. SharePoint) to Box.
This is important, as IT organizations like the flexibility that X1 provides in terms of how users can search Box content. There is an option to index Box documents and store them in the users local index. The content is not stored locally, but the index is, so users get immediate results. Of course, it may not be feasible to have an index stored locally for a variety of reasons, so there is also an option for users to remotely query their Box account without the need to store each item in the local index. IT also has fine-grained control over how indexing takes place.
Any solution that makes both end-users and IT happy is a promising one. In this way, X1’s hybrid cloud search capability is a game-changer. As more and more organizations systematically use EFSS vendors like Box, this federated search capability will become even more important. And, the great news is – it’s available right now from X1.
So far, beta customers are extremely enthusiastic about the search experience that X1 provides for content in Box. In fact, we strongly believe that no other solution provides this kind of search experience across local and Box content. Customers tell us that they can search and filter through Box content faster than ever before. At X1, we would respectfully challenge anyone to identify a better solution for this purpose – neither we nor our many joint X1/Box customers are currently aware of one.
We invite you to try for yourself:
X1 Search is available for sale at $49.95 per license for single users (Box connector included), with an annual support fee of $19.95. Buy now >
Silent installation of the X1 Search client and other enterprise deployment options are available for large-scale deployments. For more information about enterprise licensing and purchases, please contact info@x1.com.