Cloud content management and collaboration company Box Inc. is revamping its product to help remote workers at a time when more people than ever are working from home.

The company today announced an “All-New Box experience” that makes it easier for people to organize their files, annotate documents in preview mode and collaborate with their co-workers on various types of content.

“With the All-New Box, we’re taking usability even further, introducing powerful new tools for organizing your files and working together in real-time, while making it easy to bring your content into the applications you use every day,” said Box Chief Executive Aaron Levie.

The revamp introduces a new feature called “Collections,” which gives users an easier way to personalize and organize their content within Box. With Collections, now in beta, users can create and name dedicated spaces, or collections, for a variety of projects and content stored within Box. Within each collection, users can add files, folders and bookmarked documents without affecting anyone else’s access to that content.

For example, users can group documents and folders around projects or ongoing processes such as “Event contracts,” “Marketing launches” or “User research studies,” and access them quickly on the left navigation column.

In an interview with SiliconANGLE, Jeetu Patel, chief product officer and chief strategy officer at Box, said the idea is to make it easier for users to navigate through Box. To that end, the new Box experience also comes with a newly redesigned user interface, including a new action bar design, refreshed icons and more advanced preview capabilities for zip and RAW files.

“It’s all about maximizing individual productivity,” Patel said. “The modernized user interface makes it easier to navigate through files.”

Patel explained that certain market conditions tend to catalyze a transition, and that with COVID-19 forcing millions of people to work remotely, the time is ripe for Box to do assist in that.

“Remote work has become the new normal,” he said. “It’s not just a window of time. We think it will be a pretty long-lasting change.”

Another new feature is “Annotations,” which enables users to leave comments and notes in documents when they’re being viewed in preview. The feature works with more than 100 different file types, Patel said.

Also new is “File Request,” which gives users a safe and secure way to receive files and metadata from people outside their organization, even if they lack a Box account.

Lastly, Box is integrating more deeply with the video conference tool Zoom, enabling users to create or join Zoom meetings directly from any piece of content stored within Box.

The company said the new user interface, Collections and File Request features are available now in preview. The enhanced Zoom integration will launch later this month, while Annotations will be available in July.

“The future of the workforce looks starkly different to the one of the recent past, and a large number of organizations will permanently keep at least a portion of their workforce remote,” Barbara Peck, principal analyst oatNucleus Research, said in a comment provided by Box. “Box, a leader in Nucleus Research’s Content Management and Collaboration Value Matrix, is uniquely positioned to address the unprecedented shift in remote work with its focus on secure remote collaboration.”

With reporting from Robert Hof

Images: Box