Guest post by Maurice White, Sr. Enterprise Developer.
Today’s post will discuss what you can do when integrating with BlackBerry Work Drives. BlackBerry Work Drives is a powerful collaboration and file retrieval solution for the enterprise. Offered as a free app for BlackBerry 10 devices that are BlackBerry Balance enabled, it grants enterprises the ability to accomplish tasks where remote network and/or SharePoint site access is required. Devices can be mapped via BlackBerry Work Drives to securely access hosted files – stored behind your corporate firewall. Users can collaborate like never before, helping them get things done on the go.
What makes it powerful?
- Access files stored remotely on SharePoint sites
- Access files stored remotely on internal network shares
- Automatic synchronizing of latest changes to network files (via Wi-Fi or mobile networks)
- Offline Access to files via File Manager & Documents To Go
- Remote mapping of network drives or content sites by BES admin (covered in a future blog post)
In and of itself, BlackBerry Work Drives accomplishes a lot. Couple this with integration into your custom enterprise application, and it expands the possibilities as to what your organization can get done. You can build applications that tie into the BlackBerry Work Drives app through the invocation framework. Your app can invoke into the settings for either SharePoint site setup or Network Drives setup using the following target ids:
- Network Drive Settings – sys.cfs.enterprise.composer.NetworkDrive
- SharePoint Site Settings – sys.cfs.enterprise.composer.SharePoint
Leveraging WebWorks powered by Apache Cordova, the code snippet below demonstrates how simple it is to invoke the BlackBerry Work Drives app as a card.
var Invoke = {
//Invoke WorkDrives Network Drive Connection setup, as a card
workDrivesNET: function() {
var request = {
target: "sys.cfs.enterprise.composer.NetworkDrive",
action: "bb.action.VIEW"
};
//Pass the invocation request to invokeApp function
Invoke.invokeApp(request);
},
//Invoke WorkDrives Sharepoint Connection setup, as a card
workDrivesSH: function() {
var request = {
target: "sys.cfs.enterprise.composer.SharePoint",
action: "bb.action.VIEW"
};
Invoke.invokeApp(request);
},
//’request’ parm received and passed to BlackBerry Invoke method
invokeApp: function(request) {
blackberry.invoke.invoke(
request,
function() {
console.log('success');
}, function(e) {
console.log('error');
console.log(e);
}
);
}
};
- Upon execution of the workDrivesNET()function, your custom app will invoke the Work Drives app as a card, launching into the Network Drive connection setup window.
- Upon execution of the workDrivesSH() function, your custom app will invoke the Work Drives app as a card, launching into the SharePoint site connection setup window.
It’s really just that simple! A full sample called “InvokeWorkDrives” will be available on GitHub for further demonstration. Another blog post on remote mapping of BlackBerry Work Drives will be posted shortly as well. Follow me on Twitter at @MoReeseMo and feel free to post any questions and comments you have in the section below.
