Administering Box.com integration

You can enable the files getting uploaded on Jive to store on Box.com by setting up a place-level connection to synchronize files and their comments from both sides.

Managing Box

To integrate selected places with Box as the external file storage provider, and to socialize the documents you store in your Box folders, you can connect a Box account to a community. The initial relationship is created when you connect a Box admin account to your community. A Box Integration user with rights to this account is created in Jive. When community users and administrators create places, a folder within the Box account is created and identified with the name of the place. Files added to or modified in that folder from either the Box side or the Jive side are then synchronized. When a community member uploads a file to the group, the file is posted to the Box group using the Box Integration user.

This means community members don't need Box accounts to access the information in places to which they have rights. They can access and modify any files posted there from the Jive side. However, they won't have access to the contents of the folder from the Box side unless they also have a Box account. Box users who have access to the folder will also need a Jive account if they want to add more documents to the Jive-linked Box folder or modify its contents. Users can comment on documents from either side, and their comments will be visible from both Box and Jive.

Note: If you connect a space to Box, be aware that spaces with the All Registered Users permission in Jive are mapped to All Enterprise Users in Box. Users who have this permission in Box will be able to see the content, even if they don't have rights to access the Jive space.

Requirements for Box add-on

  • StreamOnce add-on. For more information about the add-on, see the Jive StreamOnce documentation.

Setting up Box integration

The complete setup includes these steps:

  1. On the Box side, apply the correct settings to your Box enterprise account as described in Configuring Box to Work with Jive.
  2. On the Box side, create the Box Integration User. This user is the account you'll use to connect your Jive community to Box. It's also the basis for a Jive system user that will be a member of every Box-linked place in Jive, linking it to the associated Box folder.
  3. On the Jive side, make sure StreamOnce add-on is installed, and then connect Jive to Box using the Jive Integration User credentials. Then decide whether users can create new places with a Box-connected folder, as described in Connecting to Box.
    Note: If you're using an SSO solution such as Okta with Box, make sure the integration user is defined as an admin. Otherwise, the identity provider could remove the integration user's administrative privileges from Box, breaking the integration.

Using more than one external storage provider

You can use more than one type of external storage. For example, you can have some of your groups store files in Jive for SharePoint, and some in Box.com. After you've set up the initial community connections to your storage accounts, connections are set up group by group. When you create a group, you decide whether the group will use native Jive storage or another storage. However, you can't connect the same group to more than one storage provider.