Cloud content management company Box Inc. is revamping its workflow automation tool Box Relay, making it easier for companies to automate business processes centered around the content they work with.

Box Relay was launched in 2016, with an emphasis on giving company workers an easier way to manage and track repetitive work processes, such as submitting expense reports and getting approval for agreements. It also enables workers to create workflows that can be shared with their colleagues, so as to boost collaboration and make these processes more efficient.

The new version of Box Relay announced today comes with a powerful new workflow engine that provides an extensive list of “if this then that” triggers and outputs designed to support various complex business processes. It also integrates something called “conditional logic,” which provides the ability to route content based on its metadata attributes, such as dates, dropdown and open text fields.

Those features are meant to help with the automation of business processes, but the most noticeable new capability for workers themselves will likely be the new “no-code” workflow builder, which allows them to build and edit new processes without any support for information technology teams.

There are also more collaborative options available for users, since Box Relay now provides the ability to assign tasks to specific individuals so that processes don’t break down. Greater visibility is another bonus, thanks to a new dashboard that makes it easier to track workflow history. In addition, there’s tighter integration with Box’s main content management platform.

With the completely rewritten Box Relay, the company is trying to move beyond its main business of providing storage and content management services and become a major player in the emerging workflow market, Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel told SiliconANGLE in an interview.

“This is going to be the way workflow will get to be a mainstream market, just like we made content management a mainstream market,” Patel said.

Patel said he thinks there will be big demand for Box Relay because content and workflows tend to be critical for most organizations. But most of these workflows, for example sales negotiations, employee onboarding and earnings call arrangements, still aren’t being automated, he said.

“These processes combine highly collaborative tasks with repeatable activities,” Patel said. “They simply don’t get done effectively today. Workflow in the enterprise as a market needs to be reimagined.”

Patel also pointed out that what Box is trying to do differs from another emerging market known as robotic process automation, which is led by well-funded startups such as UiPath Inc. and Automation Anywhere Inc. He said that those companies are focused on more “repeatable processes” such as data entry workers migrating information from one application to another. In contrast, Box Relay is designed to handle more collaborative processes that need a certain amount of judgment, Patel said.

“[It is] much more content-centric, focused on documents that need to be edited and published by five people,” for example, he said.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. agreed that Box is onto something with its revamped Relay product, noting that the automation of document creation, management and distribution is a key driver for enterprise acceleration as it eliminates many repetitive tasks. He said the first edition of Box Relay “had some clumsiness and logical breaks to address” and that these issues appear to have been fixed.

“With better low code support, seamless support for mobile and a number of external integrations, Box has gotten much closer to getting the functionality mix right,” Mueller said.

Along with the new Box Relay product, the company also announced a new Task Center that enables workers to see all of their pending tasks from a single interface. It also provides workers with options to assign tasks to other colleagues or groups, and trigger tasks within Box Relay workflows, in order to automate these processes.

In addition, the company announced three new “Box Enterprise Suites” that bundle a number of its products and services. The most basic of the three is the Digital Business edition, which includes access to Box Relay. Then there’s the Digital Workplace edition, which adds collaboration and lifecycle management tools, and finally, the Digital Workspace Global edition, which adds the ability to address data residency concerns globally.

Box Relay is currently available in beta, with general availability to come in late June. The company will offer both paid and free versions.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: Box/Facebook