This is the third post in our series on moving away from the soon-to-be-retired ANR FileVault to the Box.com service. The earlier posts were:

1. Sharing files with Box instead of the ANR File Vault (May 28, 2019)
2. Sharing files with Box instead of the ANR File Vault - How to do things in Box (June 4, 2019)

We heard a number of questions and concerns in our first Webinar, and we're providing answers and clarifications here.

Desktop clients

Box Drive is available for OSX and Windows from this link. With this tool, not only can you easily browse files in Box, you can mark folders to be available offline. These folders will be copied to your computer, and sychronized when you or other users updated them. Even without marking folders to be available offline, Box Drive caches the most recent documents you have accessed locally.

There is an older client called Box Sync as well. However, that has much more limited functionality and Box recommends users migrate to Box Drive. More information is available here.

Collaborator email lists

You cannot upload and save 'mailing lists' of users per se. However, there are alternatives:

1. You could maintain a list of users as a Box Note, and copy/paste that list into the 'Share With' box when needed. An advantaqe of this is you can have multiple editors of that list if you desire, and recent versions of the file will be maintained.
2. Groups that are defined in the campus 'Active Directory' can be imported into Box, and you can enter group names into the 'Share With' box as well as individual names and email addresses. There are over 200 ANR-related groups available, eg: ANR All, ANR BOC-K Staff, ANRCS Managers. Many of the groups are set up for internal technical/security reasons, but there are also many that organize end users such as those in the example. If you would like to use one of these groups, contact IT Help and we will try to identify or create a suitable group and make it available in Box. Be aware, however, that these group names are visible to all UCDavis Box users.

Box recommends that the number of collaborators on a file or folder be limited to 1000, although that is not a hard limit. Groups, however, count as one collaborator.

ucanr.edu versus ucdavis.edu email addresses

For those people with both (ie, most ANR staff), you can use either.

More tips

• When adding an optional message to a collaborator invite, Box.com can be persnickety about the formatting. While it allows you to do some limited formatting using HTML tags (if HTML mail is supported by the recipient), it will not allow you to include anything that looks like a URL. Even a messages including the text 'ucanr.edu' will be rejected 'because URLs are not supported in the invite message.'
• The Box Note feature provides a way to create very simple documents with limited formatting. Like other documents in Box, Box Notes maintain a version history. However, the version history is accessed differently than other files' histories: