How our top sales engineers use Stamplay to show the art of the possible with Box APIs
A recent trend in Enterprise IT is a shift towards micro-services. Rather than build monolithic applications, the constituent features are broken down into modular services and then composed to provide the required functionality. This approach benefits developers, by making it easier to reuse components - or to leverage cloud services from third party vendors like Box, and benefits the business by making IT more agile and responsive to changing needs.
Box Platform offers up our APIs as micro-services that can be integrated into your business applications. Whether that be an integration we've built, like our Box for Salesforce or Box for Office Online offerings, or applications that you build. While many developers and architects will grok the benefits of an API-first design, and their imaginations will run wild with possibilities, when we go into a sales situation it always helps to fuel that fire.
Recently, we've started using Stamplay with our prospective customers, to help demonstrate how the Box APIs can be used. Stamplay is a low-code development platform that makes working with third-party APIs as easy as connecting Lego bricks. Stamplay provides connectors to a wide array of different applications. Each connector opens the door to a collection of API services for the given application. Stamplay's visual workflow engine lets you chain these services together to build automated workflows without having to write a single line of code. What's more, Stamplay offers a catalog of project "Blueprints" - which are pre-built flows between popular apps - so that you can reuse against your own environment as a head start.
We've featured Stamplay a couple of times on the Box developer blog, with an example of creating an AI-powered digital asset management solution using Box and Clarifai's image recognition API, and most recently to create a Cisco Spark Bot for Box. This time, though, we wanted to highlight our sales engineers and how they're using Stamplay in their day to day jobs. Our vision with Box Platform is that our APIs can be used to solve a range of usecases across your business, and we're delighted to see our sales engineers picking up tools like Stamplay to make this vision real for our customers.
With that in mind, I'd like to introduce you to Salim Odero and Dirk Nielsen, rockstar Sales Engineers on the Box team. They have the magical task of driving the technical conversations that communicate the value of Box across the spectrum of stakeholders within a business from end users to IT admins and developers. Salim and Dirk have worked with a variety of customers including Toyota, Amgen, Western Digital, AT&T and Walmart.
Salim and Dirk have two scenarios to showcase for us today: the first scenario features Box as a Digital Asset Management environment where newly added images are auto-tagged using AI technology from IBM Watson's Visual Recognition service; the second scenario featuring Box's new Content Classification feature to automatically classify newly uploaded sensitive documents as Confidential.
AI-based Digital Asset Tagging with IBM
In this scenario we use the Stamplay Box connector service to monitor a digital assets folder for new images. Once an image is added Stamplay uses the connector to create a download link for the image and subsequently send the link to IBM via the Watson Visual Recognition service. Once Watson analyzes the image it generates descriptors that can then be sent back to Box and populated in the uploaded image's metadata. Those descriptors serve to enhance the search experience for the Box users as there is now greater likelihood the given image can be found in relevant keyword searches. For a video on how this was setup using Stamplay, check it out here:
Confidential File Monitor
The second scenario again makes use of the Stamplay Box connector to monitor an internal Legal team folder for newly uploaded documents. Also similar to the first scenario as new documents are added a download like is created for the document but this time is sent to a native Stamplay service called Utilities that can OCR-scan the document for certain keywords. In this case we want to identify any document that has the word 'Confidential' in it as a sensitive document that should not be shared outside of the Legal team folder collaborators. Stamplay offers If-Then branching capability to communicate back to the Box APIs only if the Utilities service does find the word 'Confidential' in a given document. In the case of a match the flow will set the Classification level of the file to Confidential which will automatically disable open and company shared link access for the document. For a video on how this was setup using Stamplay, check it out here:
Paperless Document Routing
In a final scenario, we can use the Stamplay Box connector service to automatically create Box Folders and route content appropriately. Using an updated version of their existing integration, Docusigned documents can be uploaded to Box. During the upload process, Docusign appends document type, user and geographic key:value pairs using a pre-defined Box Metadata Template. Stamplay can then read this metadata and use it to create a series of sub-folders. Once the final folder is created, we can use Stamplay to change the parent folder ID on the Docusigned document and move it to it's final Box resting place. One significant advantage of using this automated approach is the ability to apply different Retention and Classification policies depending on the folder tree, document type, region or user attributes. For a video on how this was setup using Stamplay, check it out here:
With low-code development tools like Stamplay, the possibilities are endless as to the business problems you can solve. Time-to-value is accelerated due to the ability to quickly build and deploy. Business productivity improves. You become a hero. Not bad in a day's work.
If you're interested in learning more about Stamplay or signing up for an account, check out their website at: stamplay.com. Stamplay offers several pre-built project Blueprints that feature Box integrated with other popular apps that address different business use cases. For more information on these and other Stamplay Blueprints, check out here: https://stamplay.com/blueprints. And to learn more about building apps on Box, check out https://developer.box.com.