Box announced ‘Box Developer Edition‘ at its annual BoxDev event today, giving developers a way to build on the Box platform that allows you to seamlessly bring the full power of Box into your application.
What this effectively does is instead of running the Box application, and building apps on top of it, developers can write an app and seamlessly embed Box services inside of it.
Box is promising to equip developers with the capabilities to build sophisticated content management and collaboration services with enterprise-grade security through the platform upgrades. The service comes packed with everything that’s already part of Box, including encryption, a user authentication system, regulatory compliance, and an auditing system.
Box Developer Editions privides developers:
- An independent, developer-owned Box instance  with full Box enterprise functionality  dedicated to your app.
- A new user and authentication model that makes it incredibly easy to create new Box users for your application. You own the users, the content, and the authentication and can bring a seamless user experience tailored to your customers.
- All of Box’s critical enterprise-grade functionality that more than half the Fortune 500 already trust and that you need to build (and sell) transformative software for businesses.
Box is breaking down its own mobile app into “re-usable components” that developers can pick up through four new SDKs divided up between content, browsing, sharing, and previewing functionality.
“We typically see SDKs that are very powerful, but they also tend to be complex to integrate with,” said Vanessa Larco, group product manager for Box’s mobile team.
“With one of line of code, your app can support hundreds of file types,“
The Preview SDK isn’t live yet, but Content, Browse and Share are all available now.
“Content is everywhere, on all your devices, on apps from dozens of verticals,” said Box platform director Ryan Damico, admitting that as a developer, it can be hard to work with all these variables.
It’s not yet clear what the pricing for the service will be, or when it will be available in a wide release.
Box Developer Edition is entering a “limited beta,†as of today. If you are a developer who would like to try it out, send an email to email developer-edition@box.com requesting access to the beta program. Check out Box’s blog post on Developer Edition for more detail.
