The Box soft launch is on for September 7. At that time, all current students and employees will be eligible for Box; associates will not be eligible for Box. Associates have a primary affiliation of “Other” in RefTool.
The OSU Box website will be launched on September 7 as well at box.oregonstate.edu. The dev site can be viewed here.
The Box UI is scheduled to change just before OSU’s launch date. Anyone already using Box (the pilot users) will have the choice to keep the old UI for now or upgrade. For details on the main UI look and feel changes, please see these screen captures.
Account Activation and Eligibility
Employees will be signed up in bulk for access to Box. By default, the system sends a “welcome to Box” email to new users; the project team is attempting to suppress that message to reduce confusion on the soft launch date. More details for instructors and researchers can be found on the OSU Box website.
Students will sign themselves up for Box by logging into the system one time (step-by-step instructions here). Students must be registered for classes in order to use Box. They will have 2 terms of grace following the eligible period, after which their Box data will be deleted. (Student eligibility details here.)
Why Box?
Many of you have asked “Why Box?” as opposed to other storage solutions. Please view the matrix of use cases here for details.
Some key points:
- Unlimited total storage
- 15GB max per file size
- Easily retain departmental ownership of files
The ability to create institutional folders that are not tied to an individual’s account is an important distinguishing feature of Box. Departments may request an institutional folder by submitting a ticket to the Service Desk; the request will be escalated to tier 2 for Box. In future this process may become self-service. Details on institutional folders can be found here.
Repatriation of existing Box accounts
Starting last week, anyone who was already using Box with an OSU email address received notice from Box.Support@oregonstate.edu letting them know that their account would be repatriated into the OSU instance. Anyone who is not eligible for Box with their OSU email received a notice telling them to move their content or change their email address to a non-OSU address. This has posed a problem in particular for INTO-OSU staff who were using Box with OSU emails; the Box project team are in discussion with them now.
Box Documentation
OSU Box website: box.oregonstate.edu (not live yet)
OSU Box instance: oregonstate.box.com
Box Community training and how-tos for end-users
