Dropbox is the world’s first smart workspace that helps people and teams focus on the work that matters. With more than 600 million registered users across 180 countries, we’re on a mission to design a more enlightened way of working. Dropbox is headquartered in San Francisco, CA, and has 12 offices around the world.

Authenticating

Dropbox uses OAuth, a developer-friendly delegated access protocol. Quolum has already connected the necessary wires with Dropbox. Using a sequence of click-throughs, your organization's administrator allows Quolum to make API calls to Dropbox without getting access to passwords.

Step 1: Initiate a connection to Dropbox

Click the Connect button from the Connections card. If you are not an admin, you can invite your organization's Dropbox admin to make a connection to your Dropbox organization account. When you click on the Connect button, the web browser will navigate to the Dropbox login page.

Step 2: Log in to Dropbox

Log in to Dropbox using your organization's credentials. The exact login mechanism may depend on your Dropbox plan, and the sign-in mechanism used. You may have corporate SSO such as Azure AD, GSuite, or Okta along with multi-factor authentication. Once you have successfully logged-in, Dropbox is going to ask you to grant access to Quolum.

Step 3: Provide consent to Quolum

The next screen after login into Dropbox is the consent screen. On this screen, Dropbox confirms whether you authorize Quolum to access your organization's data.

Step 4: Back to Quolum

Once you have granted access to Quolum on Dropbox's website, Dropbox is going to send you back to Quolum's page in Step 1, where you started. The Connect button on the Connections card would now say Reconnect. Reconnect is used to reauthenticate under circumstances where the access has expired.

Under the hood

Using the OAuth protocol, Quolum now has delegated access to your Dropbox Workspace. The Quolum server, running on Amazon AWS VPC, will be able to make API calls and retrieve feature-level utilization. Later, this data is crunched and available for visualization on the Quolum dashboard.