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Box.net and Fuze Box have gotten together, and the result is a huge benefit to the way we work now. If you're not tied to one computer, it makes sense to have your documents stored in the "cloud." And if you regularly collaborate with teammates, you need a way to easily share those files. That's what the Box.net and Fuze Box partnership brings.

Fuze Box started out working in VOIP and Internet telephony, says Patrick Moran, the company's chief marketing officer, but two years ago it began looking at the online collaboration space and seeing a lot of sameness and a lack of innovation. It seemed like the major players were simply copying each other, rather than thinking of fresh ideas.

The resulting service, Fuze Meeting, launched in May of this year. It offers people an easy way to meet online no matter what device they're using, bringing easy access to mobile devices and offering HD video to broadband connections. The goal was to make online meeting a compelling video experience.

Fuze Meeting allows people to collaborate on documents, and Moran says meetings are document-centric 90 percent of the time. Fuze Box went looking for partners that were already giants in the online document storage area, and Box.net was a natural.

Box.net offers simple cloud storage for all types of documents, but doesn't have live collaboration features (it lets people e-mail documents). With the two companies linked, Box.net's 2.5 million users can transfer their documents to Fuze Box servers, share them with coworkers, and then return them to their own storage space.

You can get started by first creating a Box.net account. The company offers a free version, if you first want to try it out, or paid versions if you need more storage.

Once you have your documents stored on Box.net, look to the company's partner services. There you'll find Fuze Box, which you can use to share your documents. Enable the Fuze Meeting service and click to share a document in a Fuze meeting. If this is your first time, you'll need to create an account. You can try before buying here as well, since Fuze Box offers a free version.

When you share a document with Fuze Box, it's first transcoded for Fuze Box's servers, and the result is a high-res copy that you and your meeting participants can annotate and edit. When you leave the Fuze Meeting, your document is converted back for Box.net and your changes are preserved.

Fuze Box's free version allows you to meet with up to three participants. After that, you'll need a paid account. You can choose to pay either $.12 per minute or a monthly fee of $29.

While this collaboration was just announced, Fuze Box is already calling it a win. "We're getting a lot of new accounts set up from the Box side, so it's definitely a big success from our end," says Moran.

Fuze Box is busy planning improvements. In early October, the company will let users add documents from their local machines as well as from Box.net, and will let users share documents with their Box.net contacts, not just their Fuze Meeting contacts.

There's no reason to spend money on travel or even on a cross-town cab. With Box.net and Fuze Meeting, working collaboratively is easy.

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