Why we are integrating with Box; Part 8: Our experience with Box (so far)

Kerika, Technology,

(The eighth in a series of blog posts on why we are adding integration with Box, as an alternative to our old integration with Google Drive.)

We have finished our development work on the Kerika+Box integration, and have started internal testing this week!

Our philosophy all along has been to “eat our own dogfood”: every new feature that we have ever built has been used internally, for real, by the Kerika team for its own product development and team collaboration. Since we are ourselves a distributed team, spread out between Seattle and India, it makes perfect sense for us to use Kerika to build Kerika 😉

Here’s what our Box integration testing board looks like:

Box integration testing board
Box integration testing board

We haven’t run into many problems so far: we did find one small bug in the Java Library for the Box Collaboration API, and we have been extremely impressed with the responsiveness of the Box team.

  • We first logged the bug at Github, where we had assumed (incorrectly, as it turns out) Box would want their bugs reported.
  • Having logged the bug, we pinged Indy Sen at Box, by Twitter and by email.
  • Indy responded within 15 minutes, on both Twitter and email.
  • Indy got us in touch with the API team at Box, and asked us to log the bug on Stack Overflow, where Box does its platform support.
  • We did that later in the evening, at 11:04PM.
  • Within 4 minutes a support engineer confirmed that the bug existed.
  • Later in the evening we asked a follow-up question, to confirm that our workaround was sensible.
  • The next day, before noon, their support engineer confirmed that our workaround was fine.
  • A couple of hours later, Peter Rexer told us they had fixed the bug and merged the code onto Github.

Now, admittedly, the bug was very trivial — a single misplaced character — but the responsiveness of Box as an organization just blew us away!

Contrast this with the experience we have had in the past with Google Drive, when problems would mysteriously appear and then disappear just as mysteriously, either the same day or several weeks later…

The full series: