News

Amazon Launches Preview of Administrative SDK for WorkDocs

• By David Ramel
• November 18, 2016

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) released a public preview of a new Administrative SDK for Amazon WorkDocs that lets developers integrate management functionality into apps that leverage the enterprise storage and sharing service.

AWS is looking for developers to sign up for the preview and commit to using the SDK to develop a proof-of-concept app to showcase its capabilities.

Amazon WorkDocs provides a collaborative tool for working with documents, letting users comment on files, solicit feedback on their content, make changes and so on.

AWS spokesperson Jeff Barr yesterday said the new SDK will let developers integrate WorkDocs into apps for managing content, migrating documents, scanning documents for viruses and more.

"The SDK provides full, administrator-level access to the resources contained within a WorkDocs site," Barr said in a blog post titled Attention Developers – Public Preview of Amazon WorkDocs SDK Now Available. "You can build applications that manage users, content, and permissions and sell them on AWS Marketplace for deployment through the WorkDocs administrator console."

With the SDK, developers have access to programmatic CRUD (create, read, update and delete) functionality for documents, users, folders and user permissions for files, functions and resources. Permissions are handled through the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service. For changes that are made to the files, the SDK lets developers subscribe to receive notifications via the AWS Simple Notification Service. The AWS Cloud Trail service is used to monitor API calls.

The AWS developer site for the SDK says typical apps that can be integrated with Amazon WorkDocs with the new SDK include:

• Security and compliance: Auditing, anti-virus scanning and data loss protection (DLP) applications can scan Amazon WorkDocs content either periodically or as new contents gets added, to detect security threats and data leakage, and take mitigation actions such as purging or quarantining files and enforce appropriate permission policies.
• Content migration: Migrate users and content from on-premises and cloud content repositories to WorkDocs, by automating user account provisioning, replicating folder structures, uploading files and setting permissions.
• Content integration: Integrate WorkDocs content natively into Web and mobile applications.

According to AWS documentation, the new Administrative SDK is available for the Java and Python programming languages.

Interested developers can sign up to take part in the public preview now. "During the Public Preview, we are looking for developers who are ready to commit engineering resources to the construction of a Proof of Concept application that uses the SDK, and who are willing to meet with the WorkDocs team to provide status updates and share feedback," Barr said.