Client Migration to Dropbox

TEAM IM recently aided a client in the time-sensitive process of migrating off of a legacy system and moving their content items into Dropbox. While a few of the files could be moved over as-is into a single folder, the vast majority needed to be processed and placed into a folder depending on their data. As Dropbox doesn't support properties other than a limited number of tags, all of the classification of documents needed to be performed via which folder the content items were placed into.

To facilitate this and take some of the burden off of the migration during runtime, we created a service that would act as a run-sheet for a stage of the migration. The run-sheet service would take in a range of content ids and gather all of the data that was required to migrate those files into a single csv file. From there, the csv could be run against our service that would actually perform the migration, using the data in the run-sheet to know exactly what files should be pulled from the legacy system, where they should be put into Dropbox, and what to rename the files as. Many of the content ids had more than one file associated with them, which was accounted for in the run-sheet so that they could be renamed so they would not conflict with each other.

Now that the migration has been completed, TEAM IM in the process of developing two more services that will enter all future content items into Dropbox as well, fully replacing the legacy system. The first service is a simple folder watch that will allow ad-hoc documents to be added to a existing folder structure and have their location mirrored into Dropbox. This will allow content items to be easily added to the system without having to sync the entirety of the Dropbox folder structure to the client's local machines. By itself, this approach largely eliminates the need for the legacy system that was previously in use.

The second ingestion service is more involved, taking advantage of Dropbox Forms to create and store off data submitted by external users. Users are brought to the Dropbox Form by scanning a QR code that contains extra information that is automatically burned into a PDF that also contains all of the information that they entered onto the form. Once the form has been completed, the generated PDF file is processed by the service and checked into Dropbox at the appropriate location. With this functionality, the legacy system has been surpassed as it gives a more streamlined way for new content items to be generated and automatically added to Dropbox.