Application Integration is an Integration-Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) solution in Google Cloud that offers a comprehensive set of core integration tools to connect and manage the multitude of applications and data required to support various business operations.
The Application Integration platform provides a unified integration designer with out-of-the-box triggers, custom-configurable tasks, and plug-n-play connectors. The integration designer is a drag-and-drop interface that lets you create your entire integration flow with little or no code. You can create, modify, and run all your integrations in the integration designer.
I recently rediscovered Google’s new Application Integration service, which is currently in preview. If you are unfamiliar with this service it in part “offers a drag-and-drop visual interface that lets you create an entire integration flow with little or no code. Connectors also allow you to call and perform operations on various entities”.
There are a long list tasks that can be configured for Google Cloud services, but you are not limited to just these and you can add your own data sources. As a Google Workspace Developer, it’s been interesting to look at the Apps Script task integration. With this you can get task parameters from your integration, run any operations as you would with any other Apps Script project, with the option to set integration variables for the rest of your workflow.
The linked documentation page provides setup instructions. When you setup the Apps Script integration it creates a project with some boilerplate including adding a AppsScriptTask library. Lots of possibilities to use the Apps Script built-in and advanced services to rapidly create applications. I’m looking forward to seeing what the community come up with.
Google Workspace is the most popular productivity tool on the planet — relied on by more than 3 billion users. To help organizations thrive in a hybrid world, we’ve invested heavily in immersive connections, our approach to bringing people closer together through our communication products, and smart canvas, our next-generation collaboration experience, while enhancing our cloud-first security model to help people work safer.
Today is the first day of Google Cloud Next ’22 and this flagship event is being used to announce a number of upcoming features for Google Cloud and Workspace. This post (source link at the end) from the Google Cloud blog gives a summary of some of the key announcements including:
Bringing people together with immersive connections – which announces a number of new features being introduced to enhance Google Meet, the much requested feature to include inline threaded conversations in Google Chat as well as broadcast only Chat spaces
Collapsing the boundaries between people and apps with smart canvas – which highlights updates, mainly to Google Docs, to enhance productivity with custom building block and user defined variables. Google Sheets is also getting some smart chips enhancements including smart chips data extraction and third party integration as well as a new timeline view rolling out this month
Work safer with Google – a reiteration of Google’s commitment to security with updates on data loss prevention being extended to Google Chat, Trust rules in Drive and client side encryption for Gmail and Calendar
Extending the power of Workspace – the one perhaps of most interest to Pulse readers are the opportunities to build on Google Workspace with additional APIs for Meet and Chat, a Meet add-on SDK to third party integrations directly in Meet, and an official Google Chat integration from AppSheet apps.
For some of these announcements you’ll have to wait until 2023 at the earliest to get your hands on them. For a wider narrative and to see how the tech press is responding to today’s Google Cloud Next ’22 announcements here are some stories that have caught my eye:
Google Drive alone can handle small file management jobs, but for larger batches of files, it can be too much for a simple Drive script to manage. With Google Apps Script, even large batches can be executed within 6 minutes, offering businesses the monetary and time benefits of efficient file management. This report looks at how Google Apps Script improves file management with batch requests, judging its efficacy by measuring the benchmark.
We’ve regularly highlighted work from Kanshi Tanaike in Pulse and it’s nice to see it also being highlighted in the official Google Cloud Blog. I’m sure many Google Workspace developers, like me, have encountered issues with managing large volumes of Google Drive files. In the post Kanshi Tanaike highlights how batch methods can be used to greatly speed up the process when interacting with the Google Drive API.
Join us online or in-person at Google Cloud Next ’22, our flagship event where over 1 million people across the globe come together to learn and grow. Don’t miss out on meeting other IT and security professionals, developers, and business leaders. Learn about the latest product announcements and hear valuable insights from Google executives, including Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud CEO, and Aparna Pappu, VP and GM for Google Workspace. You’ll also hear inspiring stories from our global customers, such as Airbus and Iron Mountain, and technology partners like Asana, about how they’re using Google Workspace in their organizations.
A recent post on the Google Cloud blog highlights the Google Workspace lineup of keynotes and sessions not to miss at Next ’22. There are a range of sessions from Google, global customers and partners.
If this is your first attempt at submitting an add-on for the Google Marketplace, it—like all new experiences—can take longer than expected as you learn and get comfortable with all of the requirements. You should expect pushback from both the OAuth team and the Marketplace team, as they are on the frontline of ensuring that end users have a positive experience installing Add-ons. Taking the time to slowly go through and make sure you have each of the elements along with a willingness to update and improve your application will surely result in the successful publication of your Add-on published in the Google Marketplace.
Alice Keeler knows a thing or two about publishing Google Workspace Add-ons to the Marketplace with over 20 entries. In this post on the Google Cloud Blog Alice shares some of her top tips for surviving the publication process. This includes website essentials, tips on artwork as well as creating your verification video. Follow the source link for these tips and more.
Learn how developers use Google Workspace to centralize and integrate all of their favorite Agile and DevOps tools like Jira, GitHub, Datadog, and PagerDuty.
From the Google Cloud Blog you can learn how Google Workspace is being used to make software development more agile. For Google Workspace developers this includes a number of products you might want to consider. Additionally, this post is a great way to see how Google Chat apps and Workspace Add-ons are being seamlessly integrated to expand the functionality of Google Workspace. If you haven’t recently looked at the opportunities with developing Google Chat apps you probably should…
AppSheet and Apps Script bring together a lot of powerful customization and functionality to Google Workspace, but you may be wondering when to use which platform. Here’s the answer.
This post covers various scenarios where you might want to use “AppSheet, Google Cloud’s no-code development platform, and Apps Script, Google Workspace’s integrated low-code development platform”.
It was the last line in the post that particularly caught my eye:
We plan to continue to integrate AppSheet and Apps Script in interesting ways, and to make it even easier for you to build powerful solutions. We’re eager to see what you create.
The Google Cloud Vision API is a powerful tool that helps developers build apps with visual detection features, including image labelling, face and landmark detection, and optical character recognition (OCR). Getting started building with these services is relatively simple with Apps Script, as it uses simple REST calls to interact with the API directly, eliminating the need to set up SDKs or to download client libraries.
In this post Christian Schalk, Google Cloud Developer Advocate, provides details for setting up a Google Apps Script project with the Google Vision API, using this service to perform optical character recognition on a user selected image.
10 years ago this week we introduced Google Apps Script, G Suite’s scripting platform. What started as a small experiment has grown into one of Google’s most popular developer products. To commemorate the moment, I sat down with Mike Harm, the creator of Apps Script, to reflect back on how it all got started.
