thanks, but no thanks. I spent a month building integration with google hangouts, only to see it being deprecated before we could even launch. wasted months fighting with undocumented drive realtime API issues to make it work seamlessly and it was pulled last year without replacement. drive v3 api still does not have ETAG conditional uploads that drive v2 had. never biting that google bait and switch thing with apis again.
Google Docs gets an API for task automation
101–110 of 199 posts
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#102It terrifies me how entrenched the Google suite is becoming, and more 'open' APIs will surely further that position. It's the default for most community / cross org collaboration and note-taking in my line of work. A huge amount of stuff gets done in Google docs.
And then Google ban your account for some random reason and you're suddenly barred from participating, your voice can no longer be heard, and who knows what happens to your existing contributions. I've not seen it happen first hand, but there are enough stories of people getting frozen out.
One alternative, which the Wikimedia community use, is Etherpad. It's ok for text editing but less polished.
People talk on HN about moral decisions about Google / Facebooke employees. Should that level of scrutiny apply to 3rd party plugin authors who help consolidate market share?
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#103They will have a lot of catchup to do to get where Office is now. I'm frankly amazed by how good Microsoft Flow has been. So many dumb business processes rely on an Excel doc somewhere, or a stupid manual email somewhere else. But with Flow I've seen just a single smarty-pants able to fully streamline an entire department one rule at a time. They don't need to get permission to bring in a new logo - it's part of Offi…
Wait until you look at a general purpose cross-application robotic process automation tool.
The only reason they don't have more penetration into dev mindshare is because their tech stacks are generally in the dark ages (looking at you, BluePrism and Automation Anywhere!).
That said, I've been pretty happy with UiPath, both from an openness perspective and a technical one. They've got a free trial license to test drive it too, which is nice compared to the usual "Call us for a quote" sales BS.
https://www.uipath.com/developers/community-edition-download
If anyone wants to chat enterprise process automation, feel free to hit me on email. It's been my weird niche for the past few years. Username.co at gmail.
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They don't need to get permission to bring in a new logo - it's part of Office, they can just do it. And no one has to get dragged into it kicking and screaming - you want to work off of an Excel file? Fine! It's still there! Plus it wont be randomly cancelled when Google decides they got bored with it after several years of neglecting it first.
>they got bored with it I've always wondered why Google is so bad at keeping various services going. Your comment caused me to reflect that Google hires a lot of smart people. Smart people tend to get bored with working on the same thing and want to work on new shiny things. Could it be that the smart people at Google do a bang up job of creating new services, but then get bored and move on to something new, leaving…
Meh. It's just because it no longer captures any interesting data about its users.
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#105Genuine question, What's the use case for this? If you already have to do some programming how is it different from generating html documents (like invoices) (that can be converted to PDF) and some web forms for filling out the templates?
One use case is generating contracts. The end users can maintain and author the contract templates because they are in a familiar environment. Then use the API to plug data into the placeholders to create the finished doc.
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#106Great. Can we automate changing every single goddamn spreadsheet to not be in US date format? And while we're in there, how about adding a locale for New Zealand?
ISO 8601 needs to be default everywhere.
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#107It terrifies me how entrenched the Google suite is becoming, and more 'open' APIs will surely further that position. It's the default for most community / cross org collaboration and note-taking in my line of work. A huge amount of stuff gets done in Google docs. And then Google ban your account for some random reason and you're suddenly barred from participating, your voice can no longer be heard, and who knows what…
As the CTO for a company that uses GSUITE fairly heavily, the main reason I refrain from adopting Google tech isn't so much the risk of being banned, it is the likelihood that Google will simply abandon core integration points, and will force us to re-build whatever we've implemented in Google.
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#108Great. Can we automate changing every single goddamn spreadsheet to not be in US date format? And while we're in there, how about adding a locale for New Zealand?
Similarly, a few weather apps incorrectly show the temperature in Fahrenheit for European users. It's very annoying.
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#109They will have a lot of catchup to do to get where Office is now. I'm frankly amazed by how good Microsoft Flow has been. So many dumb business processes rely on an Excel doc somewhere, or a stupid manual email somewhere else. But with Flow I've seen just a single smarty-pants able to fully streamline an entire department one rule at a time. They don't need to get permission to bring in a new logo - it's part of Offi…
Does Office 365 yet allow multiple users to edit the same document simultaneously. I really like they way it is done in Google Docs.
Yes, provided it’s stored in an MS cloud. In my experience it’s much more fragile than google docs. In my company trying to use it was a non-starter because there is too much friction to convince people to consistently keep files online and off of their desktop.
Re: Google Docs gets an API for task automation
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it still very desktop centric as all MS Office products? Because if it is you will struggle to keep up with the amount of data, report and automation that need to run on top of various cloud applications.
Office is getting to (but not quite at) that sweet spot of "it just works". So long as you save into your Onedrive a lot of that is magically taken care of. And then you get that one user who takes the collaborative document, downloads it to their desktop, then emails everyone a revision.
> And then you get that one user who takes the collaborative document, downloads it to their desktop, then emails everyone a revision.
This is a constant struggle for me. It took about 3 years, but I had most of our company using google docs and not working locally much. Then a critical mass of newcomers came and the IT department decided we should move away from google docs and so provided a file server. A year later, a few people of us are stubbornly using google docs but 80% of our files are scattered across the fileserver and desktops. And you can be sure that whatever you find on the fileserver is not the latest version.
While I’m on a rant, the same people refuse to use commenting features and instead add red text and text boxes all over the place.