Box Gap Analysis P-Q Drives

Owned by Lee Raymond
Last updated: Jul 09, 2014

P (Personal) Drives

  • Adoption of Box.net can compete with P drives in several spaces
    • We can more easily provision larger storage here at Tufts per person
    • We cannot secure (outside of the executed contract) the data present on Box.net storage
  • Adoption of Box.net opens some opportunities that are not present with P drives today
    • Ease of use with mobile devices
    • Ease of sharing with the ability to share with other Tufts members
    • Ease of sharing with non-tufts collaborators
  • File sharing supplements or replaces several other file sharing options
    • FTP
    • Email
    • Physical Media

Quota Increases for P Drives:

Effective immediately, individuals requesting increases in their P drives can be redirected to use tufts.box.com where we offer 50gb out of the box with increase allowances up to 150gb.

 

Any requests can use the following boiler plate if need be:

 

"Thank you for expressing interest in utilizing additional network storage.  At this time rather than increasing P drive quota limits, we recommend signing up and using "tufts.box.com" which offers several benefits over a standard Tufts P Drive:

  • You can access your Box account through the web and a multitude of mobile devices in addition to your computer
  • Robust storage, starting at 50gb
  • You can create and share content from your Box account easily without using file attachments in email, flash drives, etc
  • Collaborative editing and maintenance of your content.

 For more information about Tufts.Box.com and how to sign up, please visit https://it.tufts.edu/box to read more.

 

 

 

For potential follow-up questions about ability to store data, there is a related document published by general counsel and information security on the appropriateness of data into Box.com: https://it.tufts.edu/boxpol

Q (Departmental) Drives

There are some "problems" with the way that Tufts manages departmental storage and Box handles file sharing. One of the chief issues is that Departmental shares are managed by people but unlike people the departmental share does not turn-over. In box, all content is owned by a single user and then shared out to groups, but ultimately is owned by a single user.

Q Drives, however, do represent a rather large administrative burden both for the end users and technical staff.  This is exacerbated by any requests that involve "nested" permissions (major folder is restricted by security group A and a subfolder is restricted by security group "B" with "block inheritence" enabled.)

It is strongly recommended to avoid nested permissions and instead provide opportunities to encourage point to point or subset document sharing to occur using tools with self-service permissions – such as Box.com

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