A Guided Tour of the Upload & Download Blocks

[Music] hello and welcome everyone this is Mike I am the founder and CEO of SuiteDash SuiteDash is the ultimate all-in-one business software multi-tool perfect for small to medium-sized businesses seeking to streamline and automate their systems and processes our goal with this podcast is to provide you with a steady stream of useful and entertaining updates tips tricks interviews and insights that will help you maximize the impact of SuiteDash on your business and your life hello and welcome back everyone this is Mike I'll be your host for the succeed

With software podcast as always our goal in this podcast is to illuminate and elucidate concepts for you so that they become clear and you're able to move forward in your journey with SuiteDash with more confidence and today we're going to do that with file upload and file download blocks so the file upload and download blocks are designed to be deployed on a dashboard or on a portal page or something of that nature they're meant to be used by your CRM targets and they're designed to help you exchange files with your CRM targets meaning they upload to you and they are able to download files that you make available for them now uploading and downloading files is not rocket science okay of course everybody's done

It everybody's got it anywhere you go you can upload a file you can download a file it's boring right so what makes the file upload and download block different than that well I'm excited to tell you because in this platform we don't think with those old school ways of thinking meaning I can give your client an upload file mechanism that'll just upload the file to go in some bucket and you know you can go get it there and problem solved right well that's okay but that's very simple and it's not replicatable and it's not replicatable for say a future client that you don't even know who they are yet so what I mean is if you have client a then you go and create a folder for client a and send them a file upload link okay that's fine they

Upload a file it goes in client A's folder and everybody's happy except for the fact that you had to create folder a then create a file request and send it to client a so that they could upload the file to you and this is manual work so either you have to do it or someone in your staff has to do it every time you get a new client this platform is built differently this platform is built around Automation and replication and the ability to create predictable processes and workflows and the file upload and download blocks are built so that you can roll them into your automations you can replicate the system you can create predictable process es in workflows that let you create document

And teach those systems in such a way that they become non-manual said in a more clear way when client a comes on board the folder already exists and the file request gets sent automatically and when client B comes on board same CDE e f every time you add a new client and place them in that workflow via Circle affiliation or however you do it everything's already set up there is no manual work if you configure everything correctly with your file upload and download blocks and your folder generators which is the other Dynamic piece of this concept that helps you create this ability to automate the process all right so as we've discussed this podcast will

Be mostly audio but occasionally there will definitely be the need to introduce video or visual Assets in order to completely explain the concepts so what we'll do is we'll use an audio device you'll hear this sound when it's important for you to be looking at the examples given and this is nice because it allows you to look away when things are just being explained in an audio only way and then when you hear this sound you'll know to take a minute and look at the screen or later come back and check out the example if you are out on a walk or in a bike ride or something like that okay let's continue and we are going to be looking at a visual as ass set now so here's the sound okay so what we're looking at is

A dashboard that is intended to be shown to CRM targets so these are my prospects and clients that are logging into the portal to check out the dashboard and have access to all the options that are there and as you can see we're using an upload block and a download block here so let's start with the download block and we can start to understand but before we continue further let's talk about these Concepts a little more understand that very likely this dashboard has created and assigned to a wide number of my clients that are included in the same Circle or whatever description that I have decided is appropriate to access this dashboard so let's just say there's 100 clients that can access this dashboard understand that in many scenarios each

One of those clients is going to need to download a unique file or set of files that's unique to them so it won't work for me in many cases to create a download block and upload some files in this download block because then every one of those 100 clients that logs in will see the same files and there are times when that is appropriate but that's a simple concept let's talk about the other scenario where you need each one of those 100 clients to see some unique file or set of files that's exclusive only to them and this is where the upload and download blocks shine okay so I'm going to open the download block and we're going to look at the settings in this design I've left the title subtitle and description blank because I've provided that with with custom HTML but we do provide this for you in case you just don't want to custom

Design your own you can fill these in and The Styling is very basic it gets the job done and it's clean it's definitely functional but down here is where you want to focus because here are the options of user specific Dynamic path and what does this mean every one of your clients will have a specific folder a parent folder and inside that folder are several options including a uploaded by and this one target file cabinet okay so the file cabinet is really designed specifically to be used in these Dynamic situations where you want an easily definable Target destination or source for files in the case of a download block we're defining the source which means where

The files are located that we want the end user the target to download and what this mechanism does is when when we have say 100 clients that can access this page this allows me to uniquely deliver a file or set of files privately and exclusively to each one of those 100 clients if client 37 for example is receiving tax returns and my staff goes to client 37's dashboard navigates to their target file cabinet and places those tax returns inside this target file cabinet then when client 37 accesses this dashboard they will see the files that are in that folder in the download block

Available for download same thing with client 24 client 24 will see only client 24's files that are in client 24's Target file cabinet so this helps you create a definable system and process that you can follow or you can train your staff to follow to say when we generate the end product files you will then go to this file structure for the client inside this folder inside this folder whatever it might be and you will place the files there and then you're done and then that's it because you have already preconfigured this file download block to look in that folder when client 24 arrives and see are there any files in there if

There are they will be displayed to client 24 and available for download but if client 12 logs in and there are no files in client 12's Target file cabinet destination then there will be no files to download and again this makes it very easy for you to deliver files appropriately and securely with a very minimum amount of effort so when those end product files are ready you just place them in the appropriate folder which is definable by a system or process and the game is over it's done delivered available okay so let's take a moment and look at it from the files toolkit side and you'll see that I'm inside a company Millennium Falcon Inc and I have these folders

By default private files of course we don't want them to have access or download from there shared with company is a different construction submitted by company is automatically created from form submissions and flow submissions Etc uploaded by company is one of the options they can choose but let's leave that for now and I'll reference it later let's focus on the Target file cabinet which it says here is optimized for automated file exchange and if I go inside I'll see an inbound and an outbound folder these can't be changed or deleted they just indicate where you can expect to find the files depending on the use case in our case we're going to use outbound because we're using a file download block which means we're trying to move files from us from

The organization out to the end user the Target and it stands to reason if I connect a file upload block to this target file cabinet using the user specified Dynamic path option then when that Target uploads the files I would find those files in the inbound folder of the target file cabinet okay so let's see this in action I'm back at this dashboard and I'm going to open the download block I'm going to choose user specified Dynamic path I'm going to choose Target file cabinet and I'm not going to make any changes to this destination folder path and I'm just going to save here and then I'm going to save the dashboard okay and now I'm back at Millennium Falcon Inc

The company who is my target company and I'm going to go into the target file cabinet outbound because this is for a file download block and I'm going to upload some files okay and I'm just going to upload this one and this one and this one let's just say can be any files that you have can be uploaded here okay so now I have these files uploaded and now as far as I'm concerned since I've built my dashboard and assigned it to my client and I've configured the file download block properly to connect to this target file cabinet I'm done because now my file is delivered it's instantly available to my client on the dashboard that they already have access to and the only thing I might do from here is trigger an automation to send out an email to

The client to let them know that it's available okay so now let's see how the client sees it I'm going to log in as Millennium Falcon Inc represented by Harrison Ford and here are my files in the download files Now understand the advantage here if I wanted to say for example use custom menus to hide this files menu item I could do that very easily and therefore prevent them from having to go into this files menu item and navigate properly to find these files now these files are surfaced directly where I want them to be right on the dashboard and I can hide this item now and prevent confusion so

You can make available files or entire folders or even nested folder structures available to your client or your staff right here on a dashboard or in a portal page even now let's take it one step further and understand that you can put more than one file download block in a dashboard as we've done here so this is one file download block that's connected to a specific folder inside the file cabinet this file download block is connected to a different folder in the file cabinet and so on this one has no files in the folder in the file cabinet these two do and so we've easily delivered these tax returns to Starbucks to company and

It's very clear and very focused and non-confusing for your end users your CRM and staff targets all right and just to hammer home the point here we are on the admin side of that same dashboard and here are the download blocks that we just showed and here is how it's configured Target file cabinet and a folder inside the target file cabinet this one of course would be 2022 and so on and to complete the thought let's go to Company files we'll go down here to zarbuck and Target file cabinet outbound and here's 2022 and 2023 and of course inside there there are your files and

It's that easy and you can do this for every one of your CRM targets your companies and contacts you can do this for your staff if you want to create a staff dashboard that has specific files available for them you can do that and of course these same files are available to you directly on the CRM targets dashboard here just like this if you want to do it this direction so you can do it from this direction or you can do it from the files toolkit okay so if you've been paying attention so far and you're getting it then I think you probably already understand that for the file upload block when I configure it in this way user specific Dynamic path I'm using the target file cabinet and

The destination folder path is default that when the target uploads a file it's going to be found it's going to land in the Target file cabinet for that Associated Target here's an additional option you may want to toggle on if you anticipate that this target will upload multiple times this will help organize those uploads in folders with a date time stamp let's not do that today I'm going to save and save the dashboard okay now I'm on the client side and I'm here with Millennium Falcon Inc and I have the upload files block I'm going to upload a file as we did before let's just use this one it's uploaded they see that it's successfully uploaded and now we're

Back at the company files for Millennium Falcon Inc I'm going to check the inbound folder now and there's my file all right so we're back on this same dashboard on the admin side but before we continue I want to point out a few things about this dashboard when you're looking at it from the admin side from the Builder side all of these blocks have sample content in place the blocks don't look like this when they render the actual content and you can see even when you preview you can actually specify and in some cases you must specify which client will be you're simulating the preview for because

Then we filter and show you the actual results meaning the actual invoices the actual tasks the actual download files for that particular client so it's impossible to preview a dashboard in a way that is universal to every client so that's why you have this picker here and in addition even here are the download files these files don't exist inside this block they're just placeholders to show what they might look like depending on which Target is looking at this dashboard from the front end okay I think that's pretty clear but I just want to make sure you know and also this dashboard is not a default dashboard it's not a dashboard that comes pre-loaded it's a custombuilt dashboard but

You can find it in the template Library this dashboard is available for you to download directly to your account and then you can just customize the colors even if you want to customize the colors of these button blocks it makes it very easy for you to adapt this dashboard to your color scheme even change the labels or change the button block configuration Etc this one is set up for this particular account and for assets within this account so when you load it into your account of course it won't have this appointment type because your account doesn't contain this appointment type you'll have to come in and set the appointment types that you want to use or you can just change it away from the appointments to some other configuration but it's a starting point and

It can shortcut you pretty dramatically okay so now let's answer another question which I think some of you are probably thinking about and that is what are these other options Global file cabinet what does that mean well we have a user specific Dynamic path and we just explained and showed how the target file cabinet works and this is a file cabinet that's specific to a Target the global file cabinet use case is more like if you have a dashboard or portal page that is assigned to someone who purchased a product say for example and that product has a set of PDFs that needs to go along with it or be presented to all the people who purchased that product in this case everyone that accesses this dashboard does need to get the same exact

Set of PDFs and so in that case you would use something like a global file cabinet and connect the download block to that Global file cabinet now you can use an existing one if you already have one created which we don't in this account so I'm going to create a new Global file cabinet and I'll call this digital signage model Ultra HD let's say your company sells those big digital signs that businesses are putting out in front of their businesses now and it requires a lot of instruction and manuals and PDFs and you want to build a dashboard for everyone who purchases that so you can deliver all these things very easily and message to them easily etc etc or you could use this to deliver lead Gins or however you want to do it you create a file download block you're going to say create

New Global file cabinet let's do that and then we'll say Ultra model we'll just do that to make sure that the folder is created properly inside the file cabinet and then we'll click add files and now we're just going to add files and we'll use the same exact uploader these are going to be your PDFs your lead gens or whatever they're going to be uploaded here and this saves you the step of actually creating and connecting the global file cabinet so it's already done here and you click save and now I'm going to click save here and now I'm back on the client side this is the Target and you can see that now they have a folder they can go inside that folder and see the files and everyone that arrives at this dashboard now all

The people who are assigned to this dashboard will have the same exact files in this case and to illustrate even further let's look down here in global file cabinets we're going to open that here's our digital signage model we created that inside of it we are looking for what anyone buer yes outbound and now we have Ultra and we have the files inside now look what happens if we want to say oh well now you know what let's create a super ultra and why not Platinum Ultra doesn't matter right okay so now we've cre cre some more folders inside This Global file cabinet called

Digital signage model and here inside of it you have more options and now back on the client side you can see those options are there so anything you put inside this folder structure we don't have anything there now but you can even see the breadcrumbs work here they can navigate around they can just dig through the files using this very intuitive interface and now you've delivered Ed the same set of files the same folder structure to all the people who have access to this dashboard and now back on the admin side just to illustrate the same options exist for file upload block and it's very very similar as you would think you can specify

Which global file cabinet the files will be uploaded into you can specify the folders and in fact if you specify a path and we'll just call it Alpha SL Bravo and these folders don't exist we will automatically create them for you just to make sure everything is connected properly okay one last point to make and that is about folder generators which we briefly touched on earlier so you'll see if I want to make a folder generator and I want to set it for say a company and I'll say tax returns folder generator and when I click create I can go inside that folder generator and start building it these folders look quite familiar yes because these are the folders that are inside each company's individual

Folder and here's the target file cabinet and if I go to say outbound if you'll remember before if I set say 2024 and 2023 and 2022 Etc and then I apply this folder generator to every company that is entering my workflow by an automation these folders will be generated in their target file cabinet and I'm also by automation going to assign them to a dashboard that is already saved and configured and the download block used on that dashboard is already configured via the user specific Dynamic path to look in the Target file

Cabinet and maybe like the previous example I have three download blocks one will look in 2022 one will look in 2023 one will look in 2024 and now I can custom build my dashboard to show only the files that I want to show in one particular place and only the files I want to show in another particular place and all of this can be activated for your current customers of course but also for your future customers that you have no idea who they are yet so in a future customer enters a workflow you have the automation set up to apply the folder generator which makes these folders to assign a dashboard which is already configured to connect to these folders and then all you have to do when you have the final deliverable files for the project or whatever you're working on for them is have your staff simply

Go to the folder that they are trained by your systems and processes to go to and upload that final deliverable file or files and at that moment that's the delivery and then likely you're going to have them trigger an auto template that would send an email to the Target possibly change their Circle the possibilities are endless but I think it's very clear how these blocks make it so that you can precreate an entire automated structure that will work for you today tomorrow and well into the future in the same exact way and this allows you to build systems and processes Define them codify them train your staff on them and they will continue to work day after day after day in an

Efficient way that saves you time which also saves you money which then makes you more profitable which then makes your business more successful and life is good okay so that will conclude this episode I really enjoyed presenting that to you because you cannot imagine the amount of planning and design and architecture that goes into brainstorming and building mechanisms like this but just like anything the hard work is worth it when it turns out in a way that you can see has Beauty and efficiency and utility that can really make a difference in the lives of everyday businesses business owners and your staff and your clients so

Thanks for joining us for this episode of the succeed with software podcast again my name is Mike and we'll see you in the next one thanks bye [Music]