Box has come a long way from its early days as a simple cloud storage repository and has evolved into a fully-fledged cloud file sharing and collaboration platform. The Box Business plan on review also looks great value for SMEs, as £12 per user/month gets you unlimited cloud storage all round and a 5GB file size restriction on uploads.

Along with file syncing and sharing, user management and two-factor authentication, the Business plan enables enhanced reporting and security, plus integration with Active Directory and single sign-on (SSO) providers. Billing can be monthly or yearly, but Box doesn’t offer a discount for the latter and you must provide payment details prior to starting the 14-day trial.

The admin portal is easy to use and we liked the Insights page, which provides a graph of user activity for up to 90 days and can be changed to show details such as logins, uploads, downloads and edits. More graphs reveal the top files types being used, the most popular third-party apps, a map of geographical activity and a bubble chart for hourly activity.

Invite new team members by email and the link asks them to provide a password, after which they can log in to their personal cloud portal. The portal initially asks them to install the Box Sync app but we suggest taking a step back before doing this.

Box is in the process of phasing out Sync and replacing it with a new Drive app but both cannot coexist on the same system. Box Drive is designed to save local hard disk space by keeping all your work folders in the cloud and accessible from anywhere.

You can access the Box Drive folder with Windows Explorer or Mac Finder and use your favourite apps to create new documents or edit existing ones and all changes are instantly saved in the cloud. Sync is the best choice if you want offline access to your files as Drive doesn’t currently support marking files for offline access.

The Sync app links up with user’s portal where they select folders and activate syncing so they are copied down to a predefined local folder for offline access. The Drive folder shows all your cloud content and both apps provide right-click options to create email links for sharing files or locking them so no-one else can edit them.

User security is excellent: Box admins can set quotas on cloud storage, enable or disable syncing, allow them to install Box on any number of devices, force password changes, decide whether they can see all managed users and stop folder sharing with external users. Groups make it easier to manage large numbers of users as you can apply a set of base restrictions to all members.

Collaboration invitations for folders can be sent to other account users and seven access levels are available, ranging from full editorial rights down to viewing only. Users can email file share links to send a file but Box still doesn’t support file upload requests.

App choices are outstanding with Box for Office allowing you to create, edit and save files directly from Microsoft Office and Office365. Box can work with Google Docs, SalesForce, Oracle NetSuite and many others while Box for Gmail lets users attach files from Box and save them to their cloud folders directly from the Gmail portal.

The transition from the Sync to Drive apps does complicate deployment, but there’s no denying Box Business is offering a superb range of file sharing and cloud collaboration features. It’s remarkably easy to manage, offers great access security and is highly recommended for businesses of all sizes.

Small businesses that want a simple, low-cost cloud-based IP PBX will find Sipgate Team ticks plenty of boxes. The Light version starts at only £14.95 per month for three users and can be upgraded in small increments so you only pay for the features you need.

The Light version doesn’t cover calls to landlines and mobiles, which will be charged to your account as they are made – so if this is an issue consider the UK or EU call packages. The UK Call Pack bundle, for example, starts at £44.95 per month and includes all VoIP calls to UK landlines and mobiles regardless of their duration.

This latest version shows off a redesigned web portal which we found easy to use. We settled for the numbers already assigned to our account but could request local or international numbers and port over existing landlines with prices for the latter starting at £20.

To avoid unauthorized access, Sipgate posts a start code to the main account holder. We could configure our users and phones but had to wait two working days for this to arrive before we could activate our account.

Sipgate doesn’t have an import function so each user account must be created manually by entering their name and email address and assigning a phone number plus extension. On completion, they’ll receive an email with their personal web portal login details.

Hardware and software phones are also configured manually but plenty of help is at hand. We use Yealink T23G IP phones and the portal provided screenshots of their web interface showing clearly where the SIP account and proxy details are entered.

Sipgate doesn’t offer its own softphones but supports plenty of third-party products so we chose the popular Zoiper for testing. After downloading the preconfigured Windows version from Sipgate, we added the SIP ID and password as displayed in the user’s web portal.

The Zoiper iOS app is configured by tapping the QR icon at the top of its dialpad screen and scanning the code displayed in your account web page. It took a few more seconds to add our SIP credentials after which our iPad was successfully registered.

Businesses with remote offices will like the Sipgate Location feature. These link different geographical locations together within the same package, each with their own set of users, and all VoIP calls between them are free.

Place selected users in a group with a dedicated phone number and extension and when it’s called, all their phones will ring. Both groups and users can have custom greeting messages assigned but the Click2Record feature from previous versions is no longer provided so we had to record our messages separately as MP3 files and upload them as new announcements.

Group voicemail allows callers to leave a message while call forwarding and hunting rulesets redirect them to other users or phone numbers. These are quite versatile as multiple rulesets for both groups and users can apply a range of actions while schedules determine when they are active.

Call queuing and an IVR (interactive voice response) service are available in the Pro package which costs from £10 per month extra. The IVR service is basic when compared to RingCentral but does allow you to upload MP3 greeting messages that present callers with a choice of up to 10 extension numbers.

The lack of free softphones will increase per-user costs, but Sipgate’s low monthly charges and no minimum contract period can offset this extra expense. For small businesses looking to make the jump to cloud-hosted VoIP, Sipgate Team is a good choice that offers slick call handling features and easy management.

Lightroom CC might prove to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Having shoved its reluctant Creative Suite customers onto a monthly subscription plan, Adobe is now trying to do the same to photographers – by taking their photo collections hostage.

Lightroom is practically a staple amongst photography enthusiasts and professionals, not that you’d know it by the way Adobe’s allowed the application to drift over the past few years. Meaningful updates have been few and far between and performance has grown stodgy. Now we know why: Adobe has been working on a new app.

Lightroom CC is effectively a cloud version of Lightroom – now ominously rebranded Lightroom Classic CC. It’s more akin to the mobile/tablet apps that have been on iOS and Android for some time than the full-blown desktop app, and that’s reflected it in its trimmed-back feature set.

The key difference is Lightroom CC wants nothing to do with your local photo collection. You can import an old-school Lightroom catalog into Lightroom CC, but those photos will be immediately sucked up to Adobe’s cloud. Depending on the plan you choose, Adobe is offering photographers up to 1TB of cloud storage, an indication of how it wants you to forget about local storage and smash all your photos onto its servers – although even 1TB will likely prove insufficient to house the full collection of most photographers.

If you’ve carefully curated a library of presets over the years, you’ll have to manually copy those over to Lightroom CC too. Nothing is imported automatically – all you get is the pared back selection of presets that comes with Lightroom CC.

Lightroom CC’s editing tools are not a patch on those in Classic, either. Advanced controls such as split toning have gone AWOL. The handy histogram revealing where highlights and shadows have been clipped is gone. Adjustment brush presets such as dodge, burn, soften skin or teeth whitening are no more – you’re merely left to adjust the various exposure, highlights, whites and blacks sliders manually. And once you’ve finished editing a photo and want to «export» it, well… your options are save it to JPG in one of three preset sizes. Nothing like the vast array of export options you get with Classic.

To be fair to Adobe, this isn’t an either/or scenario. You can use Lightroom Classic in conjunction with the new CC app and get the best of both worlds. You can sync a Classic Collection with ‘Lightroom Mobile’ and have those photos available to edit in CC, be that on the desktop, mobile or tablets. You could twiddle with photos on your smartphone in between shoots, for example, and have them synced and waiting for you when you get home to your PC. Although we did encounter one or two delayed syncs when we tweaked a photo in CC and then opened Classic, which doesn’t bode well.

There is one very good feature that is unique to Lightroom CC: search. Enter a search term such as «dog», «car», «red» or «boy» and Lightroom CC does a pretty impressive job of sorting through your collection, without any need to tag the photos with those particular attributes first. If you were hunting through your collection to find a specific photo for a client, that could prove to be a belter of a feature.

So what’s Adobe’s game plan with Lightroom CC? As much as Adobe protests it has no plans to do away with Lightroom Classic, we simply don’t believe it. The «Classic» designation is not the kind of label you put on a product with a long-term future and some of the Adobe support materials hint at a future without Classic. Take the instructions for exporting your presets to Lightroom CC, which suggest you can move rather than copy them from the Classic folder «when the presets are no longer needed in Lightroom Classic CC».

In the meantime, photographers have four options. There are now two versions of the £10 per month Photography pack. The Lightroom CC plan includes only that app with a whopping 1TB of cloud storage. The revamped Photography plan includes CC, Classic and Photoshop, but only 20GB of cloud storage. Or you can have the best of both worlds for £20 per month: all the apps and 1TB of storage. Full-blown £50 Creative Cloud subscribers also get all the apps, but they only receive 100GB of cloud storage, which as subscribers ourselves, feels like a needless kick in the teeth.

Can we see ourselves moving to Lightroom CC only? Not a chance. Uploading batches of hundreds of RAW files to the cloud is painful, the editing tools are too basic, and we’d rather have our photo collection where we can physically touch it. Will Adobe deprive us of that choice eventually? We’d bet our mortgage on it.