I’m becoming more and more interested in Box as a cloud hosting provider for a variety of reasons including ease of use, accessibility, and security.
If you’re a Box user, one area you may not have noticed is the Updates tab. You can see exactly what is happening with your files, and you can even set up notifications when certain events happen.
The screenshots I am going to show are from the free Personal account. Business and Enterprise accounts have much more audit information available.
Box Updates Tab
If you click on the globe icon at the top, you’ll access the Updates tab.
This screen will show you everything that is going on with your files. You can see when someone uploads a file, downloads a file, edits a file, comments on a file, and many other activities.
Depending on how much you use Box and how many people you have collaborating, this can end up being a lot of updates. If you’d like, you can filter by activity.
Box Notifications
The Updates screen is handy if you want to dip in and see what is going on, but what if you need to be a bit more proactive? What if, for security reasons or otherwise, you want to be notified of some of these events?
There is a notifications setting area that you get to by clicking on your name at the top and then choose Account Settings.
Once you’re in the settings area, choose the Notifications tab.
You can control what you are notified about via email: Downloads, Uploads, Comments, Previews (viewing the document on the web), and Deletes.
These are the default settings for everywhere in your account, but what if you don’t want to be overwhelmed by notifications in general, but want to be on top of certain key folders? You can change these settings on a per-folder basis.
To change this, find the folder in the Box UI and click on the little triangle icon on the right-hand side.
Choose Properties and then Email Options for the folder.
You can then choose to override the email notifications for this specific folder.
Box gives an impressive amount of information about what is going on with your files. If you use the service, take a look at what options are available and what information you’d like to know.