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85

answers:

2

Hi

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.

A: 

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!

mattbasta
So there are no settings in Google Docs which would directly get me the update feed? Even if I was signed in?
lostInTransit
It seems that there aren't any "public" RSS feeds that you could consume. GDocs API is your best bet.
mattbasta
A: 

Yes and no. Google Docs is not a consistent set of tools, so notifications are supported but only partially. Google Spreadsheet has a set notification rules in the Tools menu Google Form is linked to spreadsheet so they're covered too

You would have to do something yourself for Document/Word and Presentation apps I would suggest reading the document from web and checking if the checksum was changed

Ilya Kochetov