The LSNC Google API Project

In 2006 Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC) was the first legal services program in the country to adopt the Google Apps platform. Since then, a growing number of legal services field programs and other non-profit organizations have migrated or anticipate migrating to the Google Apps platform to provide staff with a core complement of domain-specific, web-based applications.

The various Google Apps enable users to create, store and share content of obvious practical value, essential to the daily work of the staff who use them to assist their clients, such as: Case-related events created in an advocate’s or office’s Google Calendar; Gmail messages and attachments related to a client case; and case-related documents and files created natively, uploaded for storage, and/or shared with others from within Google Docs.

But therein lies a problem: The content created, stored or shared within Google Apps is not integrated in any practical way with other web-based applications staff rely on to do their work. At the field program level, the most critical gap is the lack of integration of these Google Apps with the program’s case management system.

That’s where the LSNC Google API Project comes into play.

LSNC has received a 2010 TIG award to overcome the lack of integration between LSNC’s domain-specific Google Apps platform and the Pika case management system, the open source PHP-based application in use by LSNC. The objectives of the project are to create practical solutions for integrating select content elements of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Groups into Pika, utilizing open source design and coding techniques readily adaptable to other open source CMS applications.

Relying on varied Google API options, the project will develop, implement and document the following four, basic use cases for such integration:

• Integration of Google Calendar functions into the CMS to track date-sensitive calendared items such as filing, hearing and trial dates and other timed or
  scheduled events on client cases, such that they appear and are accessible from either interface.
• Integration of Google Docs with the CMS, so that case-record-specific documents uploaded to the CMS case record are automatically and seamlessly
  stored in Google Docs, and appear virtually and are accessible in both locations.
• Integration of Gmail with the CMS, so that an individual Gmail message or entire Gmail conversations related to a particular case can be automatically added to the CMS case record and/or a selected file attachment to a Gmail message can be automatically added to a particular CMS case record.
• Integration of Google Groups with the CMS, so that discussion group content (e.g., a LSNC welfare discussion thread and/or related file attachments) can be
  automatically added to the CMS case record.

The final piece of this project will be the creation and population of a Google Code project hosting site to host the code actually used. This will help other field programs directly, by demystifying Google APIs, explaining how they work, and detailing the actual code used to integrate Google Apps with a case management system like Pika. Documentation of this project will not be as elaborate an affair as The Findability Project, a few years back. But we will document all the basics along with usable code, so that other organizations with an open source CMS can get grounded and build on what we learn.