Digital Pen Integration with Dropbox

As a company that has employees in different parts of the country and often out on the road, we have become reliant on Dropbox for sharing documents that we need regular access to.

It was only a matter of time before we looked at integrating Step Up Forms and the Dropbox APIs to get uploads of pen data into Dropbox.  This afternoon I put together a simple demonstrator using some c# libraries from Dropnet,  a project on github.com.

The demonstrator works as follows:

1) pen uploads are handled by a mule process that writes the data into a SQL table and creates a message in a Microsoft message queue

2) the message queue has a trigger attached to it that calls a .Net client application to post the data to the Dropbox web service

This was a really nice Friday afternoon project, I added the dropnet libraries to my trigger application, configured the dropbox application settings, added a few lines of code and bingo,  I upload my digital form and moments later I have an image file, pdf and xml rendition of my form in dropbox.

I can see a lot of value in this and will have to "productionise" this code at some point.  I can see applications for other products like Evernote too.  Watch this space!