Google Drive and Box.com Song Integration
Last November the developer released a great feature for your Song Library - the ability to simply embed into a song's page an existing Dropbox folder full of song files (PDF sheet music, MP3 learning tracks, etc). This prevented the need to manually upload each file to each song's page (as long as you had your files organised nicely in Dropbox).
As soon as this was released, several members requested the same thing for Google Drive and Box.com - at the time however, Google/Box didn't offer such a thing. Now, it is possible, and so both have now been integrated into the Platform.
If you have a folder in your Google Drive/Box.com containing the song files (PDF, MP3, etc) for one song, then you can easily and simply embed that folder into the song's page in your Platform.
For Google Drive, when it's embedded in the page, it will look like this:
And for Box.Com it will look like this:
This means that you would no longer need to attach files to each song in your Platform, which usually means uploading the files from your own computer, either one by one or one set of learning tracks at a time.
To do this for Google Drive:
- Log into Google Drive
- Right-click the folder in question
- Select the Share option
- In the Share pop-up, in the General access section, pull down the list with the heading Restricted, and select Anyone with the link
- Click the Copy link button
- Click the Done button
- Whilst logged into your Platform as an administrator, visit the song's page, and click the Update button
- Click the Integrations tab
- Paste the link into the "Google Drive Folder Share URL" box. The link will look something like this:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY_abcdefghij?usp=sharing
- Save your changes.
To do this for Box.com:
- Log into Box.com
- Navigate into the folder in question
- Click the blue Share button, top-right
- In the Share pop-up, click the Invite as editor drop-down, and select Viewer
- Below that, in the Share link section, click the Copy button
- Logged into your HarmonySite as an administrator, visit the song's page, and click the Update button
- Click the Integrations tab
- Paste the link into the "Box.com Folder Share URL" box. The link will look something like this:
- Save your changes.
That's it! Not only is this quick and easy, it doesn't use up any of your Platform's space allowance.
Further to this:
- All files can be opened, viewed and played directly from the new embedded box on the song's page.
- You can still use the existing Platform feature for uploading files and resources, especially if the resource you want to attach to the song is a YouTube video. All files that have been uploaded to a song will still be accessible to your members in the normal way. In other words, this new system does not affect anything at all - except giving you another option for providing a song's files to your members.
- A downside to this new feature is that you can't track which of your members have downloaded each Google Drive file.
- Unfortunately, there is no similar feature available for Microsoft OneDrive as they do not allow integration in the same way.
