File Storage Roadmap & Expectations

An outline of our File Storage roadmap and expectations per integration

Amy Leung avatar
Written by Amy Leung
Updated over a week ago

We will keep this guide up to date weekly as we continue building towards the GA release of File Storage.

Roadmap

File Storage

Feature

Timeline

Status

Speed and Reliability Project

Backend updates to improve the speed and reliability of our data syncs, notably improved concurrency and automated sync restarts.

November 5

Complete

Speed and Reliability Project

Improvements for Sharepoint

November 17

Complete

Support for passing MIME-type when downloading files

November 21

Complete

Speed and Reliability Project

Improvements for Box & Dropbox

November 24

In Progress

Pull users within GET /groups for Dropbox

November 24

In Progress

Better rate limit handling for Sharepoint

November 24

In Progress

Pull users within GET /groups for Google Drive

Merge work complete by December 1

Google Drive approval process may take 1-3 months

Not Started

File Picker

Feature

Timeline

Status

Updating File Picker to handle missing files for OneDrive

November 24

In Progress

[TBD] File Picker remembering which files were previously selected

January 2024

In Scoping

File Search

Q1 2024

Not Started

Selective Sync via File Picker

Ability to only sync specific files and folders

TBD

Not Started

Expectations and Nuances

There are certain nuances with File Storage integrations that we would like to point out for transparency and clarification. We are actively working on abstracting these nuances behind our unified interface.

Authenticating Permissions

  • Google Drive

    • All users should be able to link.

  • Box

    • All users should be able to link, but only Box admins will have access to Group information.

  • Dropbox

    • All users should be able to link, including Dropbox personal & Dropbox business accounts.

  • Sharepoint

    • Non-admins may require admin consent in order to utilize full capabilities of the integration, such as write permissions. The linking flow provides 3 ways to authenticate. Here is what your customers see when they go through the linking flow for SharePoint:

      • Read-only permissions for non-admin users allows the integration to read all Files, Folders, and Drives that only you have access to. It does not allow the integration to access Groups, upload Files, and create Folders.

        • Note your administrator may still restrict you from consenting. Please contact your SharePoint administrator according to the guide here.

      • Read-only permissions allow the integration to read all the Files, Folders, and Drives in your Sites. It does not allow the integration to upload Files and create Folders.

      • Read & Write permissions allow the integration to read all the Files, Folders, and Drives in your Sites, as well as upload Files and create Folders.

    • If admin consent is necessary, please read the guide here and follow instructions here to ask your SharePoint administrator to grant user consent. Alternatively, you can ask your administrator to link their SharePoint account.

  • OneDrive

    • All users except personal OneDrive accounts should be able to link.

Downloading Files

  • Google Drive

    • Google Drive does not allow downloading Google Forms

    • Google Drive has a 10MB on export size. In our experience, this estimates to a ~200kb Google Spreadsheet file or ~15MB Google Presentation file.

    • All exportable files (Google Sheets, Google Presentation, Google Docs, Google Drawings) will be exported as PDF. Note that this is the file mime type with the smallest export size out of the other file types. See Google Drive’s documentation here on export types.

      • We’re actively investigating a way for customers to define what mime type to download the file as.

    • All other files should be downloaded as their original mime type format.

  • Box

    • N/A — Files will be downloaded as their original mime type format. There is no way to define the mime type to download a Box file as. See Box’s documentation here.

  • Dropbox

    • Dropbox returns most files as binary data. You may need to convert the binary data back to the File’s mime type via binary conversion.

      • We’re investigating a way to always return the data as the File’s mime type, instead of simply passing through Dropbox’s API response.

      • We’re actively investigating a way for customers to define what mime type to download the file as.

  • Sharepoint

    • N/A — Files will be downloaded as their original mime type format.

      • We’re actively investigating a way for customers to define what mime type to download the file as.

  • OneDrive

    • N/A — Files will be downloaded as their original mime type format

      • We’re actively investigating a way for customers to define what mime type to download the file as.

Updates

Any creations, edits, or deletions to a file or folder will trigger updates in Merge. Some exceptions are due to the limitations of third-party platforms:

  • Box — updates will not be instantaneous. This is because they do not allow developers to create webhooks in the root “All Files” folder, so we cannot capture real-time changes if someone adds/changes/deletes a new folder or file in the root “All Files” folder. However, it will be captured during periodic syncs.

  • Dropbox — updates will not be instantaneous. We do not yet have webhook receiver support here yet, so changes will be captured during periodic syncs. Deleted files/folders will be detected via deletion detection feature which runs every other day.

  • OneDrive/SharePoint/Google Drive likes to batch their updates every ~1-2 minutes, so they may not emit a webhook receiver payload instantaneously after the user makes a change.

The content type won't affect whether or not you receive an update.

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