Maureen O'Gara

Teambox, a four-year-old cloud computing company headquartered in Barcelona with offices in the US, thinks it can redefine collaboration and business communications by teaming up with Box.

Its lightweight collaboration widgetry will now come with 15GB of free Box file storage per user.

It's free for up to five users, five projects or 15GB of Box storage. Beyond that, pricing starts at $5 per user per month for unlimited storage. Discounts are offered for annual and two-year subscriptions and large teams.

What it's peddling is a unified cloud platform for collaboration, communication and business applications that's supposed to result in increased productivity and faster project completion times for teams.

It claims it's the only vendor to enable organizations to integrate their own file-sharing services and web-based applications and become a single "dashboard" to run all business communications.

Teambox and its customers say e-mail and Microsoft's SharePoint are no longer viable options for project management.

In their place Teambox is offering a cloud-enabled way for teams, working out of the same building or thousands of miles away, a streamlined means of group communications.

The company, which it says it is seeing 1,000% growth a year, says the Box bundle delivers enterprise collaboration. Box won't have the Teambox collaboration.

The cloud collaboration platform is already used by more than 150,000 customers worldwide - including 1,700 paying customers - and the comp0any reckons it will get more popular with the Box storage. It's targeting companies of all sizes.

It claims it'll bring greater control over content to joint customers.

It says it's gotten dozens of early adopters, including Hulu, EMI Music, the United Nations, Warner Music, AirBnb and BVBA Compass Bank. It already counts BP, the World Bank and Groupon as users.

EMI, for one, complained that SharePoint - called old and dated and not designed for mobile or the cloud - and e-mail weren't fluid or comprehensive enough for its fast-paced operations to be truly effective. What's more other tools weren't nearly as simple or intuitive to use as Teambox.

EMI also wanted more security and recently implemented Box.

Teambox says businesses are losing control and facing escalating data security risks due to employees storing critical material in third-party services because of the increasing consumerization of IT in the workplace. Companies also have compliance concerns.

It offers auditing and usage reporting to improve compliance; two-way file syncing between Teambox and Box; and access and sharing of content from any device.

Its APIs make it easy for developers and third-party applications to integrate with Box and provide end users with a suite of services that furthers business productivity.

There's a Teambox-Box trial at https://cloud.box.com/signup/o/teambox.