Integrating file sharing into your website, Why & How?

Source: www.millionslink.com

By: Mike merrell, Fri Sep 25th, 2009

For businesses and consumers alike there are many reasons to integrate online file sharing into an existing website. For example: Personal Use: A musical band has lyrics in PDF files, artwork in JPG files, and songs in MP3 and they want to make the files available to their fans via the bands website. Their website host doesn't provide enough storage space to keep these files so the band keeps them in an online file system. That's a great start but if they can't integrate these files into their website, they will have to provide instructions for their fans to access them from their online file storage provider. Not great. Business Use: A medical transcription company decides its time to switch from old school ftp servers and clients to a file system "in the cloud". Great idea! The company can now provide file interchange with its doctors and transcribers more easily and more effectively, without any other software (ftp client applications) to install. However the idea becomes not so great if the online file system selected does not provide integration into the transcription companies' existing website. Without site integration they can only provide instructions how to access their account at www.myfilesarehere.com In both cases a simple, flexible site integration option would provide a much better solution. TrueShare provides a number of site integration options including account login integration and direct file linking with any existing website. Account Login Integration - Option 1 TrueShare provides a Site Integration feature that allows you to define a custom login screen and then produce a code snipet that can be used to embed the login screen into your website. With the Site Integration interface you can specify the login screen height, width, background color, text color, button color, border color and header image options and then preview the login screen until you find the look you want. Once you like it, just click the "Generate Code" button and you can now copy/paste the code into your site for custom integration. To access this feature, go to your "Account Settings" interface, select the "Customization" tab and then select the "Site Integration" tab - have fun. Account Login Integration - Option 2 This option provides more flexibility then Option 1 but it also requires knowledge of HTML, as it involves adding a custom form to your website that points to the TrueShare login page. The custom form will consist of at least the following HTML controls: 1 User Name text box MUST be named "UID" 1 Password text box MUST be named "Pword" 1 HTML Form With a "Post" method and an Action tag pointing to:https://www.trueshare.com/Secure/src/login/Secure_Login.aspx1 HTML Button Used to submit the form The two text boxes and the submit button all need to be contained within the form tag. If you use this method, it is recommended that you still use the TrueShare Site Integration interface to create a custom login snippet and then use the URL of the iFrame source for the action property of the login form as this will contain the custom query string that will allow users to still see your custom login screen should they have JavaScript disabled or an error occur where they are not redirected correctly after submitting the form. Account Login Integration - Option 3 Please note that this option is NOT a secure method of integration as it embeds the user id and password information into the code snipet where it is exposed in the query string for all to see. However, if you create a user account specifically for this purpose and lock down the permissions (maybe allow download capability only, no uploads, no deletes, etc.), this option is ideal for providing website traffic access to your files via a link on your website without requiring them to login with a user id and password. This is the easiest method of site integration to implement as it involves simply adding a hyperlink or a redirect to a login URL passing the username and password along with the query strings. Example: www.trueshare.com/Secure/src/login/Secure_Login.aspx? UN="user"&PW="pwd" where the values of "user" and "pwd" are replaced with the actual username and password for the account you created for this login. With this option it is also recommended that you use the TrueShare Site Integration interface as described in Option 2 above. Link Integration Options Another way to integrate your TrueShare file sharing account into your existing website is to use the linking capabilities to provide direct access to your files or photos. Currently there are 3 ways to do this: Send-A-Link - While Send-A-Link is a feature designed to securely share files and offload large attachment traffic from email systems, you can also use the link produced in the Send-A-Link email as a link available from any web page, newsletter, tweet, or blog to provide direct access to the specific files. Direct-Link - Use the link produced by the Direct-Link feature to provide single file access from any website, newsletter, tweet, or blog. In fact, use Direct-Links the same way you might reference any other file on the internet via a link. PhotoShare - Use the links provided with your PhotoShare albums to give direct access to entire collections of images and photos. Like any hyperlink you can distribute it in an email, newsletter, blog, website, tweet, RSS feed, etc. I hope this has been helpful for you and that I didn't go on so long that I lost your focus!