Remus Information Management

Since last week we started integrating the connector for the online-service Dropbox. In the following I’ll show you several scenarios how you can make your content of Remus accessible from everywhere with a dropbox account. For those wo don’t know Dropbox, Dropbox is a service which provides online storage in the cloud (free up to 2 GB).

DISCLAIMER: The screenshots (and screencast) is taken from the standalone application. If you have Remus installed in your Eclipse IDE switch to the “Information Management” perspective.

Connecting Remus with Dropbox

Actually there are two ways how you can connect to a Dropbox account:

1. Synchronization with the Folder connector: If you have the client software from Dropbox installed, you have an extra folder in you user folder called “Dropbox”, which synchronizes automatically all content with your online content. You can now create a Local Folder connector pointing to a subfolder within that folder and synchronize the content in your Remus instance with this folder.
2. Synchronization with the Dropbox Connector: Remus has a separate connector to access the content of your Dropbox directly via HTTP. So if you don’t want to install any additional software you can use this connector. This connector creates automatically a folder called “Remus” in the root folder of your dropbox and synchronizes its data within that folder.

Creating a new connector and checkout of remote content

Before you can synchronize your content you have to create a connector and checkout the content of this remote folder. This is a very easy task. You have in your coolbar a little bar with three icons.

1. The first one is to create new local information units.
2. The second is for creating and checkout a new remote repository.
3. The third is the “Synchronize” button, which updates your local or remote content

Connecting to Dropbox

Remus uses the so-called oAuth Mechanism to authorize the user on dropbox. That means your credentials are not stored locally by Remus, but the user has to grant Remus the right to access the account based on specific security tokens. So don’t worry, Remus never knows your Dropbox username or password (picture below shows the confirmation page of dropbox.com).

Creating content and committing content

After you have finished the initial checkedout, a new folder with special decorations appear in your local navigation. You can create new information units and categories under the folder (the picture below shows 2 unsubmitted information units under the dropbox-folder). Editing content can be always done offline.

If you finished editing the content you can synchronize all elements; use therefore the button in your toolbar (see picture)

After the synchronization the decorations of the information units have changed to indicate that they are in sync with the remote repository (see picture).

Using the folder connector

If you already have the software from dropbox installed, you surely want to use the folder connector. The usage of the folder connector is following exactly the same mechanism like Dropbox connector, the only difference is that you don’t have to authorize at dropbox.com, you only have to point the connector to a folder within your Dropbox-folder.

Conclusion

With the synchronization mechanism regarding the online-service Dropbox you can have the content of Remus on different computers. The connectors are compatible to each other, that means you can use on Computer A the folder connector and on Computer B the Dropbox connector to synchronize the content of your local information pool.

Advantages of the Dropbox-Connector

• No installation required
• Can synchronize multiple Dropbox accounts in one Remus instance
• No firewall issues
• No password stored locally

Advantages of the Folder-Connector

• Comitting is faster (the “real” synchronization is handled by the dropbox application)

Screencast

Below you can find a screencast on how to synchronize with Dropbox.