The Astonishing Simplicity of Silicon Connector for Box

Somebody once said that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, and I’ve found that Silicon Connector for Box exemplifies the truism. Although it’s very sophisticated under the hood, you’d never know it, because it’s so simple and direct an experience for the user.

Let’s say you use Adobe InDesign, like untold hordes of others. Whether you’re a student or a grey-haired design veteran, you’re probably familiar with building things like brochures, manuals, documents… lots of stuff that gets printed as well as maybe those that don’t, like iPad apps.  But whatever you create, you know how hard it can be to share an InDesign doc with others, especially once you’ve embedded a bunch of images in it.

And, you’re probably using the Cloud for asset storage. If you’re like many other designers, you already have a growing library of image assets in Box or something similar. If you use Box, you’ve got a lot of company, like about 20 million others (as well as over 180,000  corporations),  all around the globe.

If you don’t already use Box, you probably should give it a look. It’s replacing DropBox and FTP servers like wildfire: I’ve found that it works better and it’s more secure, with some serious encryption built in.

Once I made the leap to Box for Cloud storage, the question became: “how do I get my Box assets into InDesign?”  Simple: link them.

Yes, I’m talking live links.  As in HTTP-based links. When you use InDesign with Silicon Connector for Box, you just link your images (or other asset types) from Box, instead of copying them up and down.

It’s extremely simple to use.  Just open up the InDesign doc, drag in your images from the Box window, and you’re done.

Image from Box account, dropped into InDesign.  Five seconds, if that.

Save the InDesign doc, and its http links persist forever. Now, when you share it with colleagues, contractors or your boss, the links just work, no matter where they are, whether down the hall or in a café in Prague.  Inside the firewall or not.  Doesn’t matter – they just work.

You know how it used to be: package, upload, download, unpackage, relink images.  It was crazy, and very time-consuming.  Now all you do is open the InDesign document. Updates are immediate: Box is the only place the images live.

And that’s all there is to it.  You’d wonder why Adobe didn’t add this feature themselves, and I did too. But it doesn’t matter now, because you can add it yourself. And you should.

Click this link for a free trial:

http://www.siliconpublishing.com/contact/boxdemo.php

Full disclosure: I work with Silicon now, and I’ve been a fan of theirs for years before I joined.  So I’m biased… but trust me, this Connector thing rocks. You won’t regret it.

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