CloudFiles widget is a lightning web component that be dragged and dropped onto any Salesforce standard or custom object. Once inserted, the user can go to the respective object and link the widget to a folder sitting in SharePoint / Google Drive / OneDrive / Box / Dropbox or even AWS S3. Once linked, users can see the contents of the folder, search, preview, edit, download, share files and do a lot more. Users can also upload files directly in Salesforce which get stored in the external storage.

CloudFiles also supports linking multiple folders or files to a Salesforce record

Further, CloudFiles provides flow actions that can automate the resource(folder or file) creation and linking process, thus providing an extra layer of automation on top.

This article explains the following -

Keep scrolling for more info.

You can drag and drop the folder widget onto any standard or custom Salesforce object. Simply go to the 'Edit Page' from the object page, add a new tab to your object and drag and drop the widget. These steps are shown in the video below.

Now that your widget is setup, you can start linking files or folders with your Salesforce objects. Just click the "Select folder/file" button in the widget, select the folder from any cloud storage (e.g. SharePoint, Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, AWS S3, OneDrive) and that's it. Follow the simple steps below -

NOTE: If you see the "Connect CloudFiles" button instead of the "Select folder/file" button on the widget, this is because you recently installed the Salesforce app and haven't connected it to the CloudFiles account yet. Simply click the Connect button and follow on-screen instruction. Screenshots for this are shown in Step 2 here.

Here's a video that shows this in action. You can also connect multiple folders and files in this widget.

The connected folders are pretty easy and intuitive to use. You can upload files and create folders, search inside this folder and sub-folders, do actions such as edit in cloud drive, download, preview etc... on the files & folders. Explore the buttons all around the widget to know more.

In this section, we cover a small flow template that enables you to automatically link folders from external storage onto Salesforce pages. This flow template is available as part of the managed package and can be cloned and updated as per your business needs. 

Before setting up the automations, please connect your automation user by following the article on Automations

For the sake of simplicity, we created a simple flow that creates a folder in SharePoint whenever an contact is created, and then links it to the folder widget of that contact.

The video below shows our final flow along with the parameters we used. You can check the details on how to configure these paramters in our article on CloudFiles Template: Create & Attach Record Folder.

You can easily get the various IDs associated to this action using the simple steps below.

These steps are shown in the GIF below -

To unlink the folder or file, either go to widget home or inside the connected folder and click on the Disconnect button as shown in the image below.

There's a plethora of articles and videos that you can refer to for more information on using CloudFiles with Salesforce. The app offers a number of Lightning web components, flow actions and other flow components, custom objects and apex support which makes document automations and sharing easy.

You can not only do auto-folder creation and connection as shown above, but you can also share these files with community as well as external users. You can enable security & collect analytics on the files. With the help of flow components, processed can be completely automated.

This article links to various sections of the knowledge base that cover these components and use-cases in Salesforce.