Despite a seeming glut of online collaboration services from Slack to Facebook Inc.’s Workplace and document sharing services such as Google Docs and Microsoft Corp.’s Office 365, Box Inc. thinks there’s still a gap among them waiting to be filled.

Three years after introducing its Notes real-time document creation and sharing tool, the enterprise file sharing and content management company today announced it’s revamping the product to make it more broadly appealing. The new features for Notes, which is used by companies to share the likes of meeting notes and project plans, include a simpler web interface and desktop applications for personal computers and Apple Inc.’s Mac.

Facing a raft of competitors in its original business of offering file storage and sharing, from Google Drive to Amazon Web Services’ cloud storage to Apple Inc.’s iCloud, 12-year-old Box has steadily added on features and other kinds of applications to set its service apart and keep customers loyal. Notes was one of those, but it has gotten little attention with the ascendance of related services ranging from Google Docs to Slack Inc.’s slick team chat service.

Box has mainly aimed at enterprise customers that need security in the form of strong encryption, compliance to governance laws and the ability to retain data according to corporate or government policies. That was also the appeal of Notes, since government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, banks and some other organizations can’t use many of the wide-open collaboration tools out there — at least not officially.

The new Notes maintains those distinctions but adds two main features. For one, there’s a more streamlined experience for the web, including a sidebar section where notes can be pulled up quickly, including recently edited notes and those previously marked as favorites. That eliminates the need to dig through folders inside the Box service.

The other new wrinkle is a desktop application for Macs and PCs, a hybrid of native and web code that doesn’t require opening a web browser, so notes are more easily available. For now, there’s no offline mode, but a future release will enable it so it can be used on planes or in other situations where there’s no Internet connection.

“It’s an all-new refresh of the product,” Aaron Levie, Box’s co-founder and chief executive, told SiliconANGLE in an interview. “We think the timing is great for taking this into the enterprise.”

Actually, Notes is already being used by 40 percent of the Fortune 500 companies that are among Box’s 69,000 customers, counting 50 million users at companies such as General Electric Co., AstraZeneca plc and Indiana University. How much those organizations are using it is not certain, however, given that it’s free to Box customers. And since the 2013 launch, services such as Slack, Atlassian Corp.’s HipChat, Salesforce.com Inc.’s Quip and many other collaboration and document sharing services have caught on in many enterprises. “A lot of people haven’t really heard about this product since we launched it,” Levie conceded.

But he thinks the “gap” between traditional documents and collaboration tools for which Notes was built still exists today. The company, which went public two years ago Monday, has been working on the new Notes for the past year and a half. “We’re trying to take this modern way of working into the enterprise,” he said.

The new Notes is clearly a work in progress. Besides the lack of offline capability on the desktop, there’s also no mobile app yet, though Notes can work on the mobile web. And the key question remains: Are there enough users in constrained use cases like banks and drug companies to overcome the viral appeal of Slack and whatever new collaboration phenom comes next? That’s what Box needs to answer with Notes.

Images courtesy of Box