Mail Merge in the Cloud with Google APIs
This post is part of the Who's @ Google I/O, a series of blog posts that give a closer
look at developers who'll be speaking or demoing at Google I/O. This guest post is written by Jonathan Howard, lead
developer of Drawloop Technologies and one of the creators of DDPs for Google Apps, a cloud
based document automation service. DDPs for Google Apps will be demoing as part of the Developer Sandbox.One of the
first comments we received upon releasing our
dynamic document
packages (DDPs) for Google Apps was the lack of mail merge anywhere in the cloud. A
DDP combines one or more documents together while also merging data into those documents,
giving you a combined file with whatever page order you'd like. What we were missing from this
was a simple way of getting multiple sets of data into this DDP quickly and easily. The
business need was clearly there, and wasn't being filled. Google Apps provides not only an
excellent document management system, but also a set of great APIs that can be utilized by
third parties to expand upon the already robust offerings within Google Docs. Never ones to
back down from a challenge, we set out to determine the requirements for a
cloud-based mail merge solution.
1.
Nothing local. Like any cloud-based solution, the only thing that should be
required from a user is a solid internet connection. Their interactions shouldn't rely on
installing software or using a machine with a specific set up. Our experiences from
implementing DDPs for Google Apps served us well here, as we already were interacting with
Google Docs.
2.
Simple to manage and run. We wanted
to keep the management piece as close to what already existed as possible. This meant
utilizing as much of our work on DDPs for Google Apps intact, and wrapping the mail merge
piece around it. At runtime, the user shouldn't have to deal with complicated forms or having
to connect files together like is the norm for desktop applications.
The first problem was easily solved by extending our
existing implementation with Google Docs. Leveraging Google APIs,
we are able to use Google Docs for both management of the mail merge and storage of the
results. Since we wanted the management to leverage our existing technology and to be both
simple and entirely based in the cloud, we decided it would be best to make it wrap around our
existing DDP functionality. To manage the merge data, we create a folder inside Google Docs
and place within that folder a single spreadsheet. All data for a merge can be placed in that
spreadsheet, which we then tie directly to the existing DDP at runtime. Each row is now
considered a single DDP run with all the results streaming back to Google Docs.
One of the biggest values of utilizing a Google spreadsheet for
managing the mail merge as you have all the same functions as you normally have with
spreadsheets, such as Google forms. You can easily tie a form to the mail merge spreadsheet
and allow your own customers to populate your data for you.
You can
install your free trial of
DDPs for Google Apps by visiting the Google Apps Marketplace and
clicking on the "Add it now" button.
If you have questions or ideas
you'd like to share on this or any of our
other offerings, please visit us this week in the
Developer
Sandbox at Google I/O!
Posted by Jonathan Howard, Lead Developer of Drawloop Technologies
