Introduction

IBM Robotic Process Automation offers the possibility to integrate your automations with Google Drive’s file system when it comes to managing files on non-shared folders. To do this, you first need to create a Google Drive connection, so that IBM RPA Server can authenticate its access, then you can use this connection on Connect to Google Drive command available in IBM RPA Studio. 

However, on version 30.0.2, IBM RPA added an improvement to this feature, offering now the possibility of managing files on shared folders, expanding the automation canvas from individual tasks to collaborative ecosystems.

What’s new?

On IBM RPA 30.0.2, the connect command has another parameter called Version, that enables you to select the Google Drive version 3 API. When you select it, another parameter becomes visible, the parameter Shared Folder. This parameter must be set to true whenever you aim to manage files on shared folders, besides the ones on personal folders.

How to manage files on a shared folder

Besides setting this the parameter Shared Folder to true, when you need to refer to a shared folder, you must use the prefix $shared. The prefix is required given that we can have a personal folder with the same name as a shared folder, so IBM RPA needs to distinguish which folder should be managed. The following images contain two instances of the command Download from File System, the first one pointing to a file on a personal folder and the second one pointing to a file on a shared folder.

Sample usage scenario

The following script is a usage sample given that you have two folders with the same name. First it moves one file from one personal folder to a shared folder. Besides that, it copies a file from a shared folder to a personal folder.

defVar--name connection --type FileSystem
googleDriveConnect --name sofia_google_drive --version "v3" --sharedfolder  connection=value
fileMove --from "Testing/redblue.jpg" --to "//$shared/Testing/" --fileSystem ${connection}
fileCopy --from "//$shared/Testing/orangegreen.jpg" --to "Testing/" --fileSystem ${connection}

Conclusion

On IBM RPA’s latest version, users that make use of Google Drive Storage can now manage files on shared folders. With this new feature, IBM RPA bridged the gap between isolated automation and enterprise-scale orchestration by elevating automation from personal productivity tools to organizational force multipliers.

This way, users that use Google Drive cloud storage can now collectively collaborate on managing files, increasing the scope of its automation capabilities and enabling bots that are run by multiple users to manage files all together.

For additional information, access the IBM RPA Documentation.