Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services gave students more online storage at the beginning of this semester, increasing storage from 5GB to 50GB. Along with the increase in space came an increase in users.
The University has more than 9,900 users for Box, a collaborative online file sharing system.
CITES switched from the Netfiles file storage service to Box over the course of the last semester, retiring Netfiles on Dec. 21. Netfiles was in service for about ten years and had more users when it was retired than Box currently has, but Box is still gaining users daily and has only been in service since September 2012. CITES has had 30-50 users sign up for it per day.
Brian Mertz, chief communications officer at CITES, said the sign-up rate, “while not something for the Guinness Book of World Records, has been impressive and does show a constant demand.”
He also said the switch from Netfiles to Box was mostly because of the new storage space available, as well as other collaborative features that come with Box.
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“We’ve given most students a spot to store every document they ever create at Illinois and still have plenty of space left over,” Mertz said. “And for power users, 50GB is still a hefty amount of free storage space.”
Box users, after signing up for the service on the Illinois Box website, can upload files to Box and access them anywhere, from any device. Mike Corn, chief privacy and security officer at CITES, said the interface is the same on phones, tablets and Mac or Windows computers.
Faculty can also share documents with students via Box as long as students have signed up for a Box account.
Mertz said the 50GB of storage per user available on Box is 3GB less than the amount of free storage offered by Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon Cloud Storage, Apple iCloud, Cubby and OpenDrive combined.
CITES looked at several other file storage systems, such as Dropbox, but Corn said security concerns are the major reason the University didn’t use the system.
“Dropbox does not have a good security model,” Corn said. “It is not a good enterprise service. It’s a consumer-grade service.”
Corn said Box’s security platform was “reviewed extensively” by a team from the Internet2 Consortium. Internet2 is a consortium that brings together institutions and resources from academia, industry and government to develop new technologies and capabilities that can then be deployed over the global Internet. Rachel Levine, senior manager of public relations for Box, said the University of Indiana and University of Michigan, both members of the Internet2 Consortium, have just under 28,000 Box accounts and around 20,000 Box accounts.
Janelle can be reached at [email protected].
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Internet2 is a group of eight schools that teamed up to bring Box to their campuses. Internet2 is a consortium that brings together institutions and resources from academia, industry and government to develop new technologies and capabilities that can then be deployed over the global Internet. The Daily Illini regrets the error.
