Using Custom Terms Of Service – Box Support

The Custom Terms of Service feature can be enabled in your Box account for Business Plus and higher plans. This functionality allows you to require that all collaborators view and agree to a terms of service document before accessing your company’s Box content. It is available with both the UI and API.

Reach out to your Customer Success Manager if you would like this setting to be enabled for your account.

Note:
If you have a Box Shield contract, this feature is enabled for your enterprise by default.

Configuration

Once enabled for your organization, the Custom Terms of Service feature can be configured in the Admin Console (Admin Console >Enterprise Settings > Custom Setup tab.)

Select the types of users who require terms of service (ToS). Choose from the following:
1. No one
2. External users only
3. Managed users only
4. Managed and external users
Enter the custom terms of service you want users to view and comply with. Click Save in the top of the page.

Note
Admins cannot use the instant login feature to accepts the terms of service on behalf of an account holder. The account holder must log into box.com to do this. However, if you need that functionality, Box provides an API endpoint.

HTML Support

Custom Terms of Service feature has limited HTML support.

It supports only the tags listed below:

links <a href> and <a>,
bold ,
line breaks ,
italic , italic ,
strong ,
span ,
underline .

Known Limitations

Note:
Below limitation applies only to users that are logged in to the application when TOS is set up or updated.
If a user logs in after the custom TOS is set up or updated, they can accept it in the app.

The Box Mobile application does not allow account holders to accept custom terms of service.
However, as an account holder you can accept the custom terms of service by doing the following:

Open a web browser and log into your Box account.
Access the folder with the custom terms of service.
Accept the custom terms of service.

After accepting the ToS on either the desktop or mobile web browser, account holders can access their content through the Box Mobile application.

The User Experience

Managed Users

Once you’ve created your terms of service, the next time a managed user logs in to Box, they will have to accept the ToS to proceed to their account.

Users are asked to re-accept the ToS if you turn off the feature, save, and turn it back on again.
Users will also be asked to re-accept the ToS if you only change its text.

External Users

Once you’ve created your terms of service, existing external users will have their collaboration change to Pending and temporarily lose collaboration access to the content. The next time an external user logs in to Box, they will have to Accept the ToS to regain collaboration access to the content.

After accepting the ToS, external users will have their prior collaboration level restored. If any external collaborators do not accept the ToS within 30 days, they will be removed as a collaborator from the content.
Users are asked to re-accept the ToS if you turn off the feature, save, and turn it back on again. Users are blocked from collaborating until they have re-accepted the ToS.
Users are not asked to re-accept the ToS if you only change the terms of service text.

Note
When terms of service are enabled for external users, but then disabled before all existing external users accept the ToS, any users that were unable to accept the ToS will receive the status Pending and be removed after 30 days.

User Activity Report will show when an external user is removed from collaborations because they did not accept or rejected the ToS in 30 days. The Removed collab action will indicate that the user was removed by a backend service. The report will also show what content the user was removed from, which can help to reinstate the collaborations.