Dropbox It Helper

Automate Your Workflow with Dropbox!

Overview

Dropbox is the industry standard for file sharing. With Dropbox you can easily share large files, entire project directories or individual files as well. As any Infusionsoft user knows, the Filebox inside of Infusionsoft is quite limited. 

It has file size limitations of 10mb, which doesn't work for any video content or high resolution large data. But on top of that, it has many other flaws as well. It's really only good for simple images and very small PDF's.

The Dropbox It Helper was created so that you could share entire projects with your clients — easily.​ For example, let's say that you're a Wedding Videographer. You likely have some very large files to share with your clients.

With the Dropbox It Helper you can create a unique share for each client and put all of their individual files there. You can also specify a template source directory where all of those files are automatically copied into every single client's unique Dropbox share.

There are lots of details with this Helper, so please take the time to watch the video and read through the transcript below a couple of times, if necessary.​

Highlighted Features

  • Source Template Directory
  • Various Permission Options
  • Stores Link to Custom Field
  • Can Link to Multiple Dropbox Accounts

Source Template Directory

Many times when you're setting things up for a client, there are several files that you need to distribute to them — contract forms, templates, source files, documentation, etc... Our Helper allows you to specify a Source Template Directory where all of these common files are stored and then it will copy them all to every single client share that is created. This is very powerful.

Various Permission Options

There are several different ways to configure sharing and permissions with this Helper. 

You can create a Private or Shared client folder. A private folder would only be visible by you, the account creator. Your clients would not be able to access it. A shared folder would be used to share data with your clients and grant them access.

You can also set the Shared Folder member policy. The Member Policy controls who can access the data in the share. You can limit it just to someone within the Dropbox team that you share it with, or anyone.

Lastly, you can also set the Shared Folder access control policy. The Access Control Policy settings determine who can override the share settings. By setting it to Owner, you are controlling it. If you set it Editors, then those that you share it with will be able to share it with others as well.

There's quite a lot of detail here, so you may want to go through this part a couple of times on the video and test it out thoroughly before you deploy it to your clients to ensure proper security is in place.

Stores Link to Custom Field

When the folder link is created, we also allow you to save that link into a custom field in Infusionsoft. This way you can merge it into an email to provide to the client, for example.

Can Link to Multiple Dropbox Accounts

Lastly, multiple Dropbox accounts can be configured and associated with your single MyFusion Helper account. This allows you to work with multiple client accounts if you need to or support multiple internal project or company accounts — whatever you need.

The Toolbar

Above is the toolbar options you'll see for the Dropbox It Helper. Here are the Toolbar button options from left to right:

  • ​Copy Link for Infusionsoft - This first blue copy link button copy the URL used for the http post snippet inside of the Infusionsoft Campaign Builder.
  • Configure Button - The last button on the far right is the start configuration button which allows you to View, Edit, Copy, Delete, view the Usage Report and the Usage Log.

Tips, Tricks and Shortcuts

None, currently.

Video Transcript

Hello and welcome to MyFusion Helper. My name is Troy Broussard. In this short video, I'm going to show you how to use our Dropbox It Helper. Now, this is an incredibly powerful feature and has a few options and some security concerns that we need to walk you through. I'm going to show you first how to create the Helper inside of MyFusion Helper and then we're going to also spend some time looking at how to set it up in Infusionsoft which honestly is quite trivial but we'll go over that and how you might use it in your business.

Then next, we're going to jump in to some kind of use cases for how this might be applicable and how some of our clients were using this feature today and how you might consider using it as well. The first thing that we really need to look at is getting the app authorized on your account.

I've already set this up and configured it but when you go to create your first Helper, you're going to see a screen that looks just like this where you're going to see our app and it's going to request permission to get access to your Dropbox account. Now, you'll see that it works with multiple accounts so for example here I have a personal account as well as a business account and it will just present you with a choice and allow you to choose and select between them.

It's very simple, one click and it's installed and updated but if you do not grant that permission to your Dropbox account then obviously it's not going to be able to work for you. Let's look at the rest of the configuration. Okay, back inside of MyFusion Helper now and we're going to go ahead and create this.

Now, again, you would see that set up screen on the very first time. We'll go ahead and select Dropbox. Now, don't worry about the beta tag, it's just that we hide them until these videos are done so you'll not see that on yours and we can go ahead and give it a Dropbox It and give it a name and click configure. Then let's walk through some of this and how you use it.

Now, you see here you can add an additional Dropbox account if you want. You can select from the accounts that are set up so I'll pull one in. Then you select the folder that you want to use. Now, you can do here. I'm just going to go ahead and use one of these little folders that I have that has some intros and outros and some sound clips and stuff in it.

The next thing that we want to look at and largely for you, this is probably going to be like a clients folder. You'll probably want to create a new folder that is empty and this is where you're going to store all of the individual client share folders as a sub-folder of this. Okay? I'm using intros outros sound just as an example but more than likely you're probably going to create a folder called clients. Okay?

Now, this next feature, number three here is really, really important because it's super, super powerful. That is the ability to create a template and link it up to all of your shares. What this means is what is a template? A template is a folder that has any number of files and even sub-folders and any amount of data in it, there's no restrictions.

It really is just going to be cloned into any of the shares that you create through this app. Let's just say that for your particular service that you have several different PDFs and contracts, information that you provide your clients and so maybe they're templated contracts that they can use in their business or something like that.

You want to provide an easy way for them to access it. You would set that up as a template and now every share that you create when somebody purchase your product and it creates this automatically, it's going to automatically link all of those files into their private share. It's very, very powerful. It gives you the ability to replicate and copy data into your individual client shares simply and easily.

On this particular one, let's just say I wanted to put all of my lower thirds into a folder that all of my clients would get. They purchase some sound or video editing product here and I'm giving them a bunch of lower third bonus video clips for example. Okay? That would be an example.

Now, you want to select a field where you're going to save this folder link to inside of Infusionsoft. This is going to be just a link field and typically this is where you're going to use to merge in your emails and send a link to your client, "Hey, we've just set up this share for you in Dropbox. Here's a link to it," et cetera, right? Later if you want a direct link to files you can do stuff like that with it as well. I'm going to put this in just to custom field I've got called location and we'll throw that in there.

Then, we want to give a naming structure. Remember that this is storing all of these client folders inside of your Dropbox and so as I used in the example of saying you might want to create a folder called clients, underneath that clients folder you're probably going to want to have a naming structure for each of the folders for your individual clients.

Perhaps you do something like you type the at sign here and do something like company name and then maybe ID for the contract ID. That might be a naming structure or perhaps you do last name and then ID, right? Whatever you want to do you can put that in. If you have a custom field for a client number that you want to access or anything you want.

Just keep in mind that that's going to become the folder in the operating system and so if you want it to sort a particular way then make sure name it that way. If you want it to sort by last name first then put the last name first. If you want to look it up by the ID first you might want to put the ID first instead. Okay? That's a real simple set up here.

Next, let's talk about these individual permissions and how they work. Now, what you'll note is that we set up the defaults that we recommend and honestly, for 90% of you, you can just leave it at that and you'll be good to go. We try to make this stuff easy for you guys but we also want it to be powerful enough that you have control.

Now, a private versus a shared folder type, private just means that the only person that's going to have access to it is you through your Dropbox account. You're not going to be able to share information with your clients if you set up a private folder. Now, you may have a perfectly good reason for that.

You may be just setting it up for yourself and being able to link to it through Infusionsoft and get right into your client folder and maybe you don't want to share it with them. That's totally fine but more than likely you're probably doing Dropbox because you want to share information with your clients and so the default option would be using the shared option. Okay? The next setting here number six is the shared folder member policy.

Now, what this controls is who can gain access to the files. When you share them with a client, if they have a Dropbox business account for example and they have a team, you can restrict it to just that team or you can open it up to anyone. Recommended on this is anyone but if you want to restrict to teams you can do that. It just depends on your client's configuration but the easiest solution or recommendation here is to just leave it at anyone that has that share information.

Now, lastly is the access control policy, that's a lot of verbiage but what it really means is just who can go out and share this again, right? Who can control the settings for the share and that kind of stuff.

Almost always you're going to want to leave this as the owner which means you, that you control the policies and share restrictions on this. Very few times are you going to want to really allow your client or other editors to have access to change that around so generally you're going to leave that at the option we've selected. Okay?

All of these permissions are documented within Dropbox, if you have any questions take a look at those files first within Dropbox or reach us on the help desk but like I said, 90% of the time you're just going to want to leave this default settings. At that point you would simply create the Helper so we can just go ahead and create this. Then we're going to get that link that we use inside of Infusionsoft.

​We're going to get a copy link here and we're going to go into Dropbox and this is really easy to do. You're going to have some type of sequence that you're going to run and I should have purchased gold because a lot of times when people are going to use this Dropbox is for fulfillment.

If somebody just makes a purchase and you want to send them out a welcome email and say, "Hey, we've got a whole bunch of resources and templates and PDFs for you for the product you just bought. Here's a link to a Dropbox share where we've installed all of these files for you for your convenience." That's the scenario that you may use. Of course, if want to do it differently and use a tag to kick things off, that's perfectly fine too.

Then, we can go in here and all we have to do is just like any of the other Helpers in MyFusion Helper, we drag an HTTP Post snippet, we double click on that and we paste in our Helper ID. We set it to ready and we would comeback out and set the sequence to ready and all you would have to do now is publish it and you would be good to go.

All right, let's go ahead and jump back into the presentation and just talk of some of the use cases with this and how you can put this to use inside of your business. Now, one of the things that is probably most popular is delivering training resources, checklists, swipe files, documents, those types of things, right? Just as I showed you as a purchase fulfillment type delivery mechanism.

Now, other things that can be very useful is like professional service firms that have standard templates and contracts. Maybe you're selling a training program that you provide sample contracts for them that they can modify and so you maybe want to give them a bunch of Word docs or things like that which can be really cumbersome to distribute through Infusionsoft.

This creating a share and just giving them a link to the share is a really, really simple way of doing that. Some other things that can be very powerful are when you get into collaborative design type projects and service fulfillment for that where you have really high resolution images or like I said in the last one here, a large digital asset fulfillment.

Things like HD video or high resolution images, things like that, they can be very difficult to try to transfer any of those files in any way online and so just simply sharing them inside of a Dropbox through your Infusionsoft can be a very simple elegant solution for large media types. All right, that's a wrap for this video. This is Troy Broussard.​

If you need more help reach out on the help desk at help@myfusionsolutions.com.

Nick Kulavic
 

Nick Kulavic is the Co-Founder of MyFusion Solutions and the Lead Developer. Basically he's the wizard behind the curtain of all things MyFusion! :-)