BoardVantage Extends Mobile Collaboration Reach

For years now, senior executives have had access to expensive services that allow them to share sensitive financial documents via hosted repositories that are managed by third-party service providers. Now those same capabilities are being opened up to any employee with a mobile computing device.

BoardVantage recently launched MeetX and Backplane, departmental and enterprise-class document sharing services that BoardVantage manages via its own data centers.

According to BoardVantage CEO Joe Ruck, both services are a natural extension of NextGen, the company’s portal service for sharing sensitive documents between legal teams and members of the board. Rather than relying on consumer-grade services such as Dropbox.com, Box.net or Zenprise to share files, MeetX and Backplane are designed to allow organizations to share encrypted documents via a service that supports additional security measures such as e-signatures.

The BoardVantage Services are a little pricier than rival consumer-grade services. MeetX, with volume discounts, costs $550 to 1,000 per user per year, while Backplane is priced $80 to $350 per user per year.

Ruck says this approach resolves the dilemma that IT organizations face today when trying to maintain secure control of the IT environment while still allowing employees to use any mobile device they choose in the age of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to work.

In addition, it allows IT organizations to extend the reach of BoardVantage document sharing services to third parties without losing control of the documents, says Ruck.

Most end users violate corporate policies relating to where and when documents can be accessed in the name of productivity. For the most part, they simply haven’t been presented with a viable enterprise-class alternative to consumer-grade services. But as the cost of delivering such services via the cloud continues to drop, the more interesting enterprise-class services might become.