Indesign/Google Drive Workflow

I'm the system admin for a magazine company. We'll be moving all our files from local servers to Google Drive in the coming months. My editors and co. are worried about workflow, particularly when multiple people make changes to the same file. Google has assured me that nothing will be overwritten in this case, but that 2 copies of the file will be saved instead. This presents it's own problem, however. This would create the need for an added step of combining the copies into a final document.

I've contacted Google a couple of times and they say that there's currently no way to tell if someone else is working in a file. It would be great if one of my users could click on a file, see that someone else is working on it, and simply wait until it's open. Or even if there was a way to lock a file when it's being worked on so that other users can only open a read-only version - which is how it works with local storage as I understand it.

We're all thinking that surely we can't be the first to encounter this issue! Hopefully you guys have some ideas.

PS - constant communication, while a simple and solid suggestion, is difficult for us as many of my users work remotely rather than in the office.