I often talk to to customers with use cases that revolve around reacting to certain things happening in their Box instance. Eg. when a file is uploaded in a certain folder, when a collaboration is added to certain sensitive content, when a document is signed or even when a file is previewed they want to take further action. This can be anything from notifying another system to start or continue a workflow, to looking up and applying metadata in Box from a different source. Obviously the Box first-party applications already support user notifications for these scenarios so in this article I will outline some approaches to the backend automation side of this.