Question

I have shared a Google Docs folder with our remote team and a few members of my team. Is it possible to send out emails to all collaborators/viewers when a document is uploaded or edited in the folder?

Otherwise it becomes difficult to keep track of whether anything was changed or not.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Yes! Check out the Google Documents List Data API. Basically, you post a signed request to the API requesting specific documents or a list of documents overall and Google responds with an Atom feed of the documents that you’re looking for. Among the tags is <updated>, which contains the timestamp of the last modification. If you keep a local listing of files handy, you can compare to see if any revisions were made.

Also interesting in the feed is <published>, which describes when a doc was created. If you know the last time you checked for updates, any docs published after that time can be considered newly created.

I’m not going to get into code (doesn’t sound like what you’re asking for), but this should get you on the right track. Hope it helps!