By Amanda McCoy
Students and faculty can now store their work in a safe and secure environment and access it from another device using the program Box at Fresno State.
“The pilot program of Box at Fresno State was rolled out last January,” said Vicki Taylor, administrative project coordinator for Technology Services. “It was available to faculty and staff last spring and became available to students in August.”
Taylor, along with Peter Fortuna, a Desktop Services consultant, provide Box training for employees and will support the Box Drop-In Lab.
“Right now I am preparing fliers to distribute to students to let them know they have 5GB of free online storage waiting for them at fresnostate.box.com,” Taylor said.
Taylor began utilizing Box at Fresno State in February. Previously she used other online filing services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, SugarSync and the consumer version of Box.
“Now that I have experienced what the Fresno State sponsored enterprise version has to offer, I can’t imagine using anything else,” Taylor said.
The new program allows users to store, edit, manage, collaborate, and share files and folders in a convenient and secure workspace. It is compatible with most browsers and applications, and accounts can be safely accessed from school, home and mobile devices.
“I broke my laptop over the summer, so Box at Fresno State has been a great help to me when I am working on any papers for school,” Fresno State student Laura Lopez said. “I can just start my paper at school, save what I have done to Box, and then open it again off of any computer or even my phone when I am ready to start working on it again.”
For students who are always on-the-go, there is an application called Box for Mobile where students can access, view, edit, collaborate, share and manage files on a mobile device or tablet.
Fortuna said the files are always backed up so users do not have to worry about how to recover files. Data is fully encrypted, stored in multiple enterprise grade data centers and accounts are password protected.
“I use Box as a tool to gather meeting content, review information and collaborate in meetings,” Taylor said. “One of the best features Box at Fresno State offers is the ability to lock files you are working on so others you are collaborating with can’t make edits and overwrite all of your hard work.
“When you are done with your edits, you simply unlock the file and the next collaborator can access it and make their edits. If someone does accidentally overwrite your edits, which we all know occasionally happens, Box offers ‘versioning’ so you can access past versions of the document.”
As of Sept. 10 there were 2,309 faculty accounts and 214 student accounts on Box.
During the month of September, Box at Fresno State is holding a weekly contest for its users. The winners will get a free T-shirt.
In order to win, the contestant must be a registered Fresno State student. Multiple submissions are allowed as long as it’s not the same idea and teams of three or less can submit to the contest. For a chance to win, “share” your best example of how you use Box at Fresno State to support learning with [email protected].
Box can be accessed online at fresnostate.box.com. There is also an app for smart phones that can be found at fresnostate.edu/box as well as a quick user guide that outlines the many features Box offers.