Google-drive – How to search for the newest files in a Google Drive

Once a file is uploaded can others in my organization see the files and download them as they need to?

You will have to setup sharing options; also unless its set to Public I think others will need to have Google accounts to manage the access rights.

Can I upload and download any file type with Google Drive?

Not 'any' type, but it covers a lot of the common use cases: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Drive#Supported_file_formats

Edit: As @William Jackson points out in the comment below, this is the list of files that can be edited in docs, if you only care about storage then it should accept any file type.

I created a command-line tool to handle this.

After following the setup instructions on the GitHub project, you can run the tool with a specified path prefix and the email address of the new owner:

python transfer.py PATH-PREFIX NEW-OWNER-EMAIL

After getting authorization from OAuth, it will recursively walk the Google Drive account it got authorization to, match against the path prefix (ignoring non-matches), and then transfer ownership to the new email. If the new email address indicates a user who isn't even shared on the item yet, it will handle that as well. The current owner will not lose access, but the new or old owner can revoke it.

I should note that it's not always possible to transfer ownership of an item in Drive. For example, it's not possible to move ownership for an item from G Suite (Google Apps for Work) account to a normal GMail account. It can be shared (which the script will do), but ownership transfer will fail.