Posts tagged: google apps

  • Monday
  • May 14
  • 2012

Google Drive and the price of progress

Last year we started work on the LSNC Google API Project, a project we completed a few months ago. The gist of the project was to exploit open source Google APIs to integrate components of the Google Apps platform with the Pika case management system. At the most recent TIG Conference in Albuquerque, I gave a non-technical presentation about the project; last month, Michael Cizmar of MC+A in Chicago and Mark Sawyer, LSNC IT Manager, gave an IT-oriented presenation about the project at the most recent NTEN Conference.

Working on this project has been particularly daunting at two major breakpoints, no pun intended: We had the courage–perhaps the folly– last year of working on the development of our Google Apps integrations right at the juncture when Google made enormous changes to the underlying architecture of its core Google Apps, including Gmail, Calendar and Docs. (Anyone who was an active Google Apps user last year understands how significant the changes–hundreds of them–were made.) Those architectural changes in short order broke our project code. We rolled with it and spent additional months refactoring the code.

In March, we rolled out in sequence our updated code set to our entire organization with integrations of Gmail, Calendar and Docs and Groups. A month later, Google rolls out Google Drive, its very impressive replacement for Google Docs. And, not so surprisingly given our earlier experience, Google’s changes with the new Google Drive architecture broke our Docs and Gmail integrations. Again. Presumably, this is because both our Docs and Gmail integrations have dependencies on file synchronization and share processes that have changed with the Google Drive architecture. We’re on it, but we will have to make further changes, again.

The price of progress. But looking at the long term, I think Google Drive is well worth the cost to our project.

  • Sunday
  • January 22
  • 2012

Integrating Gmail and Google Groups with the Pika CMS

A few weeks back the project team uploaded a complete version 4 code set to the LSNC Google API Project. This latest version is inclusive of four Google Apps core app integrations — Google Calendar, Google Docs, Gmail and Google Groups with the Pika CMS. This is the same project I described during my recent presentation at the 2012 TIG Conference in Albuquerque. As I noted there, we are spending the next few weeks doing expanded beta testing with users across varied positions and office locations within Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC). We expect to deploy all four integrations throughout the organization by the end of February.

In earlier posts I have described how the Google Calendar integration and Google Docs integration work. The short version is that, by exploiting the Google Apps APIs for Google Calendar and Google Docs, we have been able to implement a seamless synchronization between the Pika CMS calendar and document posting functions with Google Calendar and Google Docs. Pika CMS users need do nothing differently than what they are already doing to have tickler calendar events show up in their Google Calendars, or have case-related files uploaded to Pika show up in a case-specific shared collection in Google Docs.

The new Gmail integration in version 4 is arguably the most important of the four integrations. The basic user problem has been this: Everyone within LSNC — like most everyone else on professional planet Earth — day-in and day-out relies on email to accomplish their work. In our case, advocates regularly communicate with clients, co-counsel, opposing counsel, public and private individuals and entities and, of course, other LSNC staffers. But how are they to get those Gmail messages into case-related case notes in Pika? At the moment, what they do is cut-n-paste, again and again and again without end. The Gmail integration is designed to simplify that process so that users, from within a Gmail message or the entire conversation, can seamlessly post the content of Gmail messages to a client-specific case record automatically, without the need to open Pika.

To accomplish this, we have embedded a new Gmail widget that displays at the bottom of every Gmail message. Below is a screenshot of a developer version of the integration, with the gadget labeled as “TKLAPP Staging Pika – Attach to Case Notes.”

The default behavior of this gadget is to automatically copy the currently viewed Gmail message to the case notes in the selected client case record. To trigger that functionality, users toggle the gadget to display a dialog with a search option to locate any currently open client case record in Pika. Two tabs are available, one to search the user’s assigned active (open) cases and the other to search more broadly all cases active (open) throughout the organization. Once users select a case record, they have two check-box options: one to save any files attached to the Gmail message, which are automatically uploaded to the Pika case record and simultaneously synchronized to the user’s Google Docs account; the other to copy the entire Gmail conversation (Google’s name for an email message thread). Users can then simply click the “Attach to Case” button to seamlessly copy the Gmail message to the case record.

But wait… there’s more!

The gadget also offers an alternate input button allowing the user to “Edit and Attach to Case.” Clicking that button invokes a pop-up window with the Gmail message copied over to Google Docs for editing before the content is posted to Pika. The user can edit the single Gmail message or conversation as is their wont and then click on “Attach to Case” in the editing window to post the edited content to Pika. Done. Without ever having opened Pika.

The Google Groups integration works on the same premise as the Gmail integration, with the approach being to enable users to automatically copy a Groups discussion automatically to a Pika case record. The Groups solution is less elegant, however. Going into this project we made the mistaken assumption that, like the other Google Apps core applications, there was a Google API for Groups, but there is not. Google Groups has no exposed web API. So we did a workaround. The Google Groups integration with Pika requires the user add a custom bookmarklet to the browser bookmarks toolbar. Once that is set up, the user can go to a Business Groups discussion within our domain, click on the bookmarklet and trigger a set of dialogs directly analogous to how the Gmail integration works, with the ability to search for a specific client case record and then “attach” or “edit and attach” the content of the discussion message. (Google Groups no longer allows file attachments to discussion group messages, so there is no option to attach files.)

For those interested in this code set, you can anticipate there will be some minor updates to the code set over the next month or two as we fix quirks that emerge from our further beta testing. There is also an updated guide to installation coming soon.

Thanks again to everyone who attended the TIG presentation. It was encouraging to see how much interest there was within the larger legal services community in this project. My prediction is that within a few years we will all look back at this coding project as somewhat quaint, only a first step in many to come as we all increasingly rely on the Google Apps platform and work more with the Google API to take full advantage of it.

  • Monday
  • October 10
  • 2011

Google and the Circle of Life

A few weeks back, at a LSNC organization-wide staff meeting, I gave the type of tech presentation I am always asked to give at such events: A state-of-organizational-tech overview/update, reviewing what has changed at LSNC in the last year and what changes are coming in the next, with a few tech funsies to keep the crowd awake. We did have some real fun with the session. Among other things, the LSNC tech team attempted some Harry Potter shtick involving an audience volunteer, a wizard’s hat, an incantation of “Google nexus transportus confundum!” while automatically uploading a photo to the web clipboard in Google Docs, via a Google Nexus phone. While amused by the shtick (you had to be there), the smartphone-savvy audience was also largely unimpressed, as if to say, “Tell me something I don’t already know.”

Whew, is it ever getting harder to impress our staff with technology. The transformative Big-Bang days are long over. The technology bar has raised considerably the last few years within our organization, and while changes are appreciated they often evoke an expression akin to “Is that all you’ve got?”

To be fair, we were able to show our staffers a few things that were new for them, most notably a preview of the Google Apps + Pika integrations everyone at LSNC have been hearing about but most had not seen before. Folks were attentive as we showed them the Google Calendar and Google Docs integrations, their silent nods saying, “Good, good.” When we showed them how the Gmail integration works, the reaction was anything but silent. All we did was show a Gmail message and drew attention to a new button at the bottom of the message. When the presenter Mark Sawyer said, “… and when you click on this button the message is automatically copied over to your Pika case notes,” the room exploded with applause.

Was the applause a measure of their being impressed by the technology? Not really, in my view. I think it was a measure of how users of very familiar technologies — in this case the Pika case management system and Gmail — now think or expect the technologies to work… together. It was not an “Oh My God” moment. It was a “Thank God” moment. The applause was a shared expression of technological redemption from the tedium of having, for so long, to copy-n-paste email messages from Gmail over to Pika. The audience was not so much amazed as relieved.

Such sentiment is a shift in what are practical, reasonable expectations among our users about now common technologies working the way they need them to work. In our organization’s case, the adoption of the Google Apps platform is not about what is cool or even “the Google” itself. What it is really about is the shift in a larger, overarching work paradigm. The desktop, the cloud and mobile devices are not separate work paradigms. They are simply tools that we can reasonably anticipate our users need or will need soon enough to do their work, to be productive. To be Google-specific about it, that is the thinking behind our efforts at exploiting the Google API to integrate or share, as seamlessly as possible, select content within Pika with Google Calendar and Google Docs, or within Gmail and Google Groups with Pika.

Although there are pockets of differences within our organization, it is fair to say that most here have settled into the new work paradigm: the networked desktop is just another device connected to the web, which is the cloud, which is accessible most everywhere via any number of mobile devices. Hakuna matata, my friends. It’s the circle of life.

  • Wednesday
  • August 17
  • 2011

How the Google Docs integration with Pika works

The second version of the LSNC Google API Project includes an integration of Google Docs with the PHP-based Pika CMS. Implementation of this integration results in a totally seamless synchronization of Google Docs with any files added to a client-specific case record. Add a file to the case-record “documents” page in Pika, and that same file, in its original file format, is automatically synced to the Google Docs folder of all advocates associated with that particular case record.

Here are some screenshots to give you a feel for how it works: First, you upload the files to Pika, which natively stores the files in its database. This shows how the uploaded files display within the Pika user interface:

Second, well, that’s it. You’re done. Really.

Without any further user interaction required, Google Docs synchronizes with Pika and adds those same files to the individual Google Docs accounts of all the users associated with the client case record. The synchronization process adds the files to a client-specific subfolder, with the client’s last name and case number, residing below an upper level folder called “My Cases,” which is itself a special folder within the Google Docs “Collections shared with me.” For example, here are the same files synchronized to Google Docs to the folder labeled “Collections shared with me > My Cases > Forcast – 10-11-00004″ (to state the obvious, this is not a real client):

Once the Pika case-related documents are synchronized to Google Docs, the users can use the documents from within Google Docs as they would any other: navigate to it, search for it, view it, share it, download it, whatever. For example, here is how a Word file orginally uploaded to Pika and then synced to Google Docs looks in the view mode from within Google Docs:

So, imagine you get a Gmail or Google Chat message from another advocate, asking if you have a good example of a motion to quash a subpoena, and you know you have one in the “Forcast” case. Hey, you’re already in your Google Apps, so you just go to Google Docs, navigate or search for the case or document, and there it is. You go ahead and do a Google Docs share to the person who made the request. Done. Without ever having to even open up Pika.

That’s the name of that tune.

  • Thursday
  • August 4
  • 2011

Screenshots of the Pika gadget integration with Google Calendar

The goal of the LSNC Google API Project is to come up with practical integration of the Pika case management system with four core Google Apps. We have completed beta testing of two of those integrations, for Google Calendar and Google Docs, and this month are bearing down on the last two, for Gmail and Google Groups. The project as a whole will be completed by year’s end and will include documentation at the project code site to help IT folks familiar with Pika to replicate the project.

From the UX perspective, the goal is to create integrations that are as seamless as possible. For example, the first integration we built was one that synchronizes the Pika tickler calendaring function with the personal calendars of all the advocates associated with a particular client case record. For us the measure of success is that users continue to experience the Pika tickler functionality as they always have, but with the magic that their Pika tickler events automatically appear in their personal Google Calendars.

The integration requires the activation of a “Pika Gadget” via a new option in the individual user’s Pika account preferences. Clicking on the option triggers a standard Google dialog for confirming its activation:

Once activated, the Google Calendar synchronizes with Pika tickler activities. The tickler entries display and function exactly like any other item in one’s Google Calendar.

Here are a few screenshots illustrating how this all looks. In order, they are: A Pika tickler event page (which includes a new field for “Where,” corresponding to the same data in the Google Calendar); the tickled event displayed in the Google Calendar “day” view; the same event displayed in the Google Calendar “month” view; and the same event again, with the standard Google Calendar pop-up triggered when one clicks on the event in the Google Calendar:

As you can see from the last image, clicking on the tickler event from within Google Calendar triggers a display on the right with basic information about the related case record, including the case number, the client’s name, address and phone number. Clicking on the case number will open the corresponding case record within Pika. Users can also edit the tickler or add a new one to the particular case by clicking on the corresponding buttons displayed below the case information. That’s how that works.

Fellow Pika users: Don’t thank me. Thank Michael Cizmar at MC+A, the Gandalf of Google APIs!

  • Sunday
  • June 12
  • 2011

What our tech training survey tells us

In preparation for an annual managers’ retreat later this month, and an upcoming program-wide annual staff meeting this Fall, the tech team at LSNC (a k a “Team Gizmo”) recently conducted a survey to get a handle on how our 150 employees currently use technology to get their work done. Experience has taught us that we get markedly more participation in such surveys if we make the survey short (10-15 questions, tops) and relatively anonymous (identify your office location and position, but personal identification is not required.) Certainly, it is helpful to know what technologies staffers use or don’t use. More specifically, we were looking for data that would reveal major gaps in tech training and learning.

A distillation of the results can be viewed in the LSNC Tech Training Survey: The Big Numbers.

By way of background, some of these overall survey results are not particularly surprising. For example, not shown in these results is our institutional reality that, with rare exceptions, LSNC staff are required to use Gmail and Google Calendar, but not Google Docs or other Google Apps. It is not surprising, then, that users are more familiar with and feel less need for training on Gmail and Google Calendar than they do for other Google Apps. And since our adoption of the Pika CMS several years ago, staff have long been encouraged, if not required, to use the Firefox browser, which undoubtedly explains its overwhelming dominance of use at 94%. LSNC also remains flexible about what “word processor” staff use. (My apologies to those taken aback by the quotes, but I consider that term so… antiquated.) LSNC supports and staff are free to use any text editor they choose, but production of form and non-form court documents are subject to specific office protocols that include standardized pleading templates conforming to California Court Rules that work for both Word and WordPerfect.

As the survey results show, and as expected, use of Word (73%) has overtaken the still popular but inexorably fading WordPerfect (65%) in use by staffers. (Full disclosure: I am in the WordPerfect camp, but even I no longer use it except for formal court document preparation. My workaday text editor of choice? Google Docs.) The surprising number here is how much Google Docs is now regularly used among LSNC staffers: 38%. (We specifically asked whether they used it regularly, not whether they had used it at all.) Google Docs is not practical for preparation of formal court pleadings, but is now trending upward as a regularly used text-editing and document-sharing work horse among staff. The web-based work paradigm has definitely broken through across all LSNC staff. Not all staff use Google Docs, to be sure, but the vast majority are now confident how to upload files to Google Docs (75%) and share Google Docs (68%). I was personally pleased to see that 30% of LSNC staff also now regularly use Google Chrome, a much higher rate than I expected.

And what about staff perceptions of their tech training needs? Truthfully, I was personally surprised to see that 38% of staff felt no need for training on desktop applications, and even 24% did not feel the need for training on web-based applications. I would not have guessed numbers that high. But for those who did express a need, what were the big numbers? The five highest requests for tech training were all for web-based applications:

  • 58% ~ Manymoon
  • 41% ~ Google Spreadsheets
  • 28% ~ Google Docs
  • 18% ~ Google Calendar
  • 11% ~ Gmail

It is worth noting what these five applications have in common: They are all core Google Apps or, in the case of Manymoon, integrated with Google Apps.

  • Tuesday
  • April 26
  • 2011

Google Calendar component of LSNC Google API Project posted

The LSNC Google API Project has posted its first code iteration, an integration of Google Calendar with the Pika CMS. This first iteration includes basic installation instructions for implementing the integration. You can expect additional code iterations over the next several months as we roll out code integrations with Gmail, Google Docs and Google Groups.

LSNC’s development partner on this project is Michael Cizmar and his team at Chicago-based MC+A. This morning, MC+A issued a press release announcing the release of this first component. (MC+A was also our partner on The Findability Project.)

With the public launch of the project, I will begin to post here regularly about the project and detail more about how LSNC is implementing these integrations. You’re gonna like this, people!

  • Tuesday
  • March 29
  • 2011

The impact of proliferating “share” options on our use of project management tools

Last week, after several years of gratifying experience with Basecamp, our organization dialed down our account to the free plan, just to keep the account minimally active. Other than that, we have stopped using Basecamp.

How did that happen? Was it something Basecamp did? No, not at all.

Basecamp is a fantastic product. It was only three years ago that I gave a TIG presentation about Basecamp in which I sang the praises of Basecamp and how it was an indispensable tool in planning, editing and building out the California Food Stamp Guide web project, one which involved collaboration among eleven editors sprawled across four different legal services organizations. At that juncture, Basecamp was the web-based benchmark for project management: A secure, well designed, user friendly set of core project management tools (tasks, milestones, messaging and file storage) in a web-based workspace enabling multiple users from multiple locations to get things done on a shared project. It was an especially remarkable application 3-5 years ago because it effectively — and uniquely — integrated in one web location what we increasingly saw the need to do: Share stuff via the Web. Or as the metaphor for web productivity is now called, “the Cloud.”

What has changed in the last several years is that the notion of “sharing” things via the Web, once a novel or niche concept, is now the new norm. And the options for sharing work activity and work product have exploded exponentially in the last few years. During a recent telephone conversation with an executive director of another non-profit advocacy organization here in California who had called to talk about our organization’s experience with Google Apps, I started talking a fair amount about how the work paradigm has shifted so dramatically the last few years because of the proliferation of web-based applications like Gmail and Google Docs and Google Calendar. Part of that paradigm shift is the increasingly widespread expectation that someone you work with can “share” things with you, which is to say you are able to let the other person, via a web browser or mobile app, view, edit or comment on a shared document, presentation, image, whatever. I commented during the conversation something to the effect that there was a point in time when I thought it was odd that someone told me I could not send them a fax because their office had no fax machine; and at a later point in time when someone explained they had to fax something to me because they did not have email at their office; and then I observed that “I think we have reached a new tipping point, where others will reasonably expect you can offer or accept sharing of documents and files using applications like Google Docs.”

There’s the rub for an application like Basecamp. Five years ago what Basecamp offered was unique. It no longer is. The practical reality is that most everything we used to do with Basecamp we can now do with, or better, or in a more facile fashion with our hosted Google Apps. Shareable files with Google Docs. Check. Shareable real-time “writeboards” and editing with Google Docs. Check. Native document editing and sharing of MS Office files via Google Docs with Google Cloud Connect. Check. Integrated messaging with Gmail, Google Chat, and Google Docs. Check. Real-time document commenting with Google Docs Discussions. Check. Shareable private or public project content sites with Google Sites. Check. And for larger private or public work projects that require more complicated task and milestone management, well, there is Manymoon with Google Docs and Google Calendar integration. Check, and then some.

That is what the share explosion has done to our use of Basecamp, which remains an exceptional product but is no longer integral to what we do.

  • Thursday
  • February 24
  • 2011

The Manymoon experience

This post about Manymoon is prompted by several things: A few weeks back the relentless Google promotion machine highlighted Manymoon as a Google Apps Marketplace success story. That post was preceded in early February by Manymoon’s acquisition by Salesforce.com. Unrelated to these two particular events, I have been working with three other Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC) attorneys on an in-house webinar on the effective use of Manymoon in legal services practice, now scheduled for late March. Which training in turn was prompted by LSNC’s already substantial experience with Manymoon.

So, that’s the setup: Manymoon is a big Google Apps success, so much so it has been bought out by one of the biggest CRM dogs on the planet; and we have done some heavy lifting with Manymoon for the better part of the last year. We obviously like it. It helps us get the job done. What’s not to like? Well, actually, there are problems with Manymoon, but allow me first to explain why we like it and continue to use it and are now purposefully promoting its use more broadly throughout our organization.

Manymoon has been a poster child for Google Apps integration since the debut of the Google Apps Marketplace in March 2010. We have since tried a lot of different apps promoted at the marketplace, but have found most of them uncompelling because most are either better suited to conventional corporate work environments and work flow, or targeted at tasks or tools that are not widely useful within our non-profit organization. The big exception has been Manymoon, which offers basic project management tools that in quite useful ways integrate well with the original core Google Apps platform, which is to say Gmail, Google Docs and Google Calendar.

There are other project management apps that integrate with Google Apps, but Manymoon is the one that broke through for us. Why? Because it provides a simple way to organize, share and communicate project-based information within our Google Apps domain. Do I actually use it? Yes. I currently maintain 16 different Manymoon projects to organize and coordinate my work with various LSNC staff across multiple office locations.

If what your users need are basic web-based tools to create a project, organize and assign tasks, establish milestones, attach files to those projects, calendar project-related events, and get timely calendar and email notifications about what’s happening on projects, then Manymoon does that for you. Is it the most sophisticated or complex web-based project management tool out there? No doubt it is not. (Hey, you need Gantt charts to get excited? Try something else.) Yet the basic tools Manymoon offers are integrated in practical ways with Google Apps.

What does that mean? Most importantly what it means is that once you have logged into your domain’s Google Apps, you are automatically logged into Manymoon. Users can click on a Manymoon link that drops down from the horizontal menu at the upper left of the Google Apps UI, to get to their projects. And once there, users discover that all the other users within your domain are automatically added to their list of “Connections” (think “Contacts”) and can be added as project members as easily as they could be added to a Gmail message. Users can also attach Google Docs documents or files to a project because the user’s Google Docs and the Manymoon platform are already connected. Manymoon also enables users to send calendar and email notifications automatically to project members within your domain, as well as to outside members added from outside the domain. Good stuff.

Let me give you a very concrete example of a current use. One of my fellow LSNC regional counsel regularly works as a mentor of newer lawyers on writ practice in California courts. She now has those new attorneys create Manymoon projects using a private custom project template she has created called “Writ Task List,” which includes the seven basic milestones and 57 related tasks involved in pursuing a writ, from point A to point Z. She doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time she teams up with a fellow attorney on a writ. She just has them create a new project with her well honed project lists, and everyone is good to go. Aces.

So, what’s not to like about Manymoon? Most of my objections have to do with problematic UI design. Among them are:

  • The most widespread complaint our users have is that, in several places in the UI, the fonts are simply too small. As a result, parts of the menus are hard to read and it is too easy to not even notice some options. Sure, users could rely on their browser’s zoom text option to increase the font size but why should the average user have to do so? And they are the ones complaining about this.
  • A corollary to the font size issue, is the over reliance on low-contrast typographic design. This makes usable features too easy to overlook and simply harder to read than should be the case. Manymoon seriously needs to re-evaluate its color and contrast schemes.
  • Another common complaint I hear is a lack of situational awareness within Manymoon. A lot of our users complain that it is just too easy to get confused about where they actually are within the application. In fairness, this problem abates some as one gets more familiar with the Manymoon interface. But because so many screens look so similar across the application, users can find themselves having to regroup mentally to get oriented before proceeding.
  • It is not intuitive how to add a title to a link you want to share. Yeah, there is a “preview” button, but perhaps it should be labeled “Edit link title” or something like that. Users here thought the “preview” button was like within Google Apps, i.e., you would see the linked site in a browser window. It ain’t.
  • Forget it if you want to edit or rename a tag in Manymoon. Once you create a tag you are stuck with it. In my view it is not reasonable to ask users to delete the tag and start over, which is the tech support suggestion I got when I asked about this.
  • At the user level, one cannot set a default, initial state or optional “home” page view. For example, it would be handy to be able to default to a specific project or location within a project.
  • At the administrative level, one cannot view all projects. (For example, in contrast, within Google Sites, a site administrator can view all Sites within the Google Apps domain.) This is problematic for someone like me, since I can’t really tell how and by whom the Manymoon platform is actually being used within our organization unless I am added to every project. Which is never going to happen and not what I would want to happen, in any event.
  • I am being peevish here, but Manymoon does not permit profile photo uploads in PNG format. What were you thinking, Manymoon?

I absolutely respect how challenging UX design is. And Manymoon obviously has made noteworthy efforts to keep the UI logical and compact, if too often not sufficiently intuitive. I think among the most pressing needs are to refresh or retheme the whole font, color and contrast implementation and work to simplify the layout as much as possible to afford better user orientation. On a more positive note, we have found Manymoon technical support to be quick, courteous and responsive. Very nice folks to deal with.

There is a lot of Manymoon love here, but we’re selfish. We want more love back.

  • Wednesday
  • February 9
  • 2011

My Google Docs screen

I haven’t thought about it for a while, but if asked I certainly would acknowledge this: I am increasingly using Google Docs not only to create outlines, long-form notes, basic text documents, and so on, but also as my basic file storage system. To get an idea how I use Google Docs, click on the thumbnail to the right to see a full-sized screenshot of my current Google Docs home view, from within our organization’s Google Apps:

A big, gaping hole in the Google Apps platform is, of course, the lack of desktop and device synchronization, single or mulitple. If only Google would adds this functionality so that it is native to the platform! What I want for Google Docs, not surprisingly, is something as simple, polished and bugless as Dropbox. Yes, there are differing options that get me almost there, but in every instance the implementation, the bugs or simply the cost are problematic.

A case in point is Insync, which is apparently still in private beta but now asserts bragging rights for really significant Google Apps integration and is available on a user-limited basis at the Google Apps Marketplace. Contrary to all the five-star reviews there, when we tried it out we found that it worked, yes, but synchronization was pretty sluggish, including inexplicably long delays in synchronizing locally created folders to Google Docs. And despite the attempts of multiple users, no one could successfully get Insync to change its default folder location for the local sync. (In fairness to Insync, the problems we experienced may be attributable to major changes Google recently made to the Google Docs UI.) And there is still no telling what this service will cost.

But I did learn one thing: Once I did an Insync synchronization to my desktop, I checked to see the volume of all my synchronized files. I had well over a half GB, which tells me I am waaaaaaay Cloud dependent at this point.

  • Tuesday
  • January 11
  • 2011

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.

  • Wednesday
  • November 17
  • 2010

Create an SPF record for your Google Apps domain

Recently, we moved all our organization’s discussion groups over from the consumer version of Google Groups to the Google Apps version. One of the features we particularly like about the Google Groups integration into Google Apps is the option for nesting one group within another. This nesting option has made maintaining membership lists among multiple substantive discussion groups way, way easier. For example, we keep a master list of all LSNC advocates in one group, and then we nest that group within other groups, to deliver messages to our housing discussion group, and our health discussion group, and so on. This eliminates the need to maintain duplicate membership lists across multiple substantive groups that have, essentially, the same members.

But when we first set this all up, we encountered a technical problem that we did not even notice for several weeks until a pattern revealed itself: Some (but not all) group messages to some (but not all) groups were not being delivered to some (but not all) members. Yipes!

To its considerable credit, Google Enterprise responded swiftly to our request for technical support on this issue. As it turns out, the solution to the problem was quite simple: We needed to create a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record for our domain, something that Google Enterprise specifically recommends but which we had not implemented. Doing so involved a simple update to our domain’s DNS records.

Within a day of those changes, the delivery problems disappeared. Problem solved. Lesson learned.

  • Tuesday
  • October 19
  • 2010

A few more notes about the Google “full-account” transition

Following up on the earlier post about Google’s soon-required transition of Google Apps accounts to “full-account” status, it is worth mentioning that Lifehacker has a helpful article from a few months back that details How to Migrate Your Entire Google Account to a New One. The article hits the most prominent apps: Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Reader and YouTube. Helpful stuff, but…

While most of the more popular Google applications have been pulled into the new Google Enterprise full-account architecture, not all have and some are still in an in-between state. (My discussion below about Google Analytics is an example.) In any event, in no particular order, and with a grain of Webdogs salt, here is a handful of notes about making the transition with four Google tools commonly used within the legal services community:

Google Analytics (GA)

Such as it is, the anecdotal information posted at the Google Analytics help forum and at Lifehacker about how to transfer a Google Analytics account to another email address appears to be out-of-date, at least as of this week at our domain. Once I made the full-account transition, my initial experience with GA was pretty much what has been described by others in the past: If you added your Google corporate email address (e.g., john.doe@lsnc.net) as an “administrator” to a profile in your being-transitioned personal consumer GA account (e.g., john.doe+personal@lsnc.net) — Bingo!, the GA profile would automatically appear in your corporate GA account.

It was too good to be true. This week, when I logged into my GA account using my corporate Gmail address, I could see all my GA site profiles listed but when I clicked to view a report for this site, GA forced me to “create” a new profile. Essentially, GA is now forcing me to re-establish all my profiles with my account. Apparently during this transition, the inaccessible old profile is displayed along with the new one, as illustrated above.

FeedBurner

This was pretty painless, actually, Google’s Feedburner provides a feed-by-feed account transfer option. Login into your personal consumer Gmail account (e.g., john.doe+personal@lsnc.net), select the individual feed, and then click on Transfer Feed. The rest is self-explanatory. You will need to do this for each individual feed in your account that you want to transfer to your corporate Gmail account.

Google Custom Site-search (GSS)

I don’t know that this works with the free version of Google Site-Search. But LSNC has a couple of paid GSS accounts, and so all we did was contact Google Enterprise support, requested that the account be transferred from one Gmail account to the other, and after a few email exchanges, it was done. The short version is this: Google clones the account from the old email address to the new one, but with one difference: As Google Enterprise support explained, “you will need to replace any references in your configuration to the old unique identifiers and REPLACE it with the new unique identifiers in HTML or web pages that use the search engines.” That’s the name of that tune.

Google Voice

There is conflicting advice on this when you search for the solution to Google Voice. As I mentioned in the earlier post on this topic, it appears that one can make a request to transfer a Google Voice account associated with your personal Gmail account to your Google Apps account. Two big ifs, here: Your organization must have completed the full-account transition process (we have not) and you will need to enter the organization’s Google Apps PIN. Since that is something we are not about to distribute openly within our organization, once we complete the transition the LSNC IT staff will be the ones making such requests for the LSNC staffers.

There is light at the end of the Google full-account transition tunnel. Just keep moving toward the light.

  • Wednesday
  • October 13
  • 2010

Making the Google “full-account” transition

The problem is one familiar to those who rely on an email address linked to their organization’s domain: They used the email address to set up a Google “consumer” account to take advantage of any number of Google applications, such as Google Docs, Google Reader, Google Voice, whatever. But then their organization got a Google Enterprise “corporate” account by adopting the Google Apps platform for that same domain. As a result, users found themselves with dueling or conflicting Google accounts linked to the same email address, and messages prompting them to choose, for example, whether they want to login into their personal consumer Google Docs account or to their corporate Google Docs account, part of their organization’s Google Apps account.

Conflicting Google Accounts

Adding annoyance to injury, users became chronically frustrated when they would login into their Google Apps account to use an application like Google Docs, but then had to do a separate login with the same email address to access another Google application that was not yet even part of the Google Apps platform, like Google Reader or Google Voice.

Since May, Google has signaled it would be moving purposefully toward single login integration of more Google applications. To do so, Google has been actively rebuilding its Google Apps infrastructure. But there is no free lunch to be had with this transition, since users eventually will have to go through some toil and trouble to resolve their conflicting consumer and corporate Google accounts.

That said, what Google now calls a “full account” transition, with one login to access all Google applications linked to one’s domain email address, is manageable. But it takes some attentive work at the individual user level because there is no magic button that will port your content or settings over from your Google consumer account to your Google corporate user account. You will need to slog through each application and decide what to do to reach Google account single-login nirvana. (Yes, that’s a joke.) You will want to get familiar with Google’s Data Liberation Front. (That’s not a joke.)

Early last month Google provided an early-adopter option to transition to the new Google Apps infrastructure, on a user-by-user basis within one’s domain. Google indicates it will force the transition this Fall.

Based on our experience at LSNC, I would recommend taking advantage of this option immediately, so that you can see, on a limited basis, exactly what happens as users make the transition. You’ll be glad you did. Our experience with a small group of early adopters was that it can be very understandably confusing about what to do with the conflicting accounts, how to assign a new email address to one’s conflicting Google consumer account, how to get one’s stuff over from, say, one’s consumer Google Docs account to one’s Google Apps Google Docs, and on and on. We spent several days troubleshooting a small set of user transitions, and we believe it will seriously help us with the global transition we plan to implement in a few weeks.

Trust me, you will not anticipate every scenario with every Google application, and you will feel frustration. For example, at LSNC we had migrated some but not all of our consumer Google Groups discussion groups (you know, “@googlegroups.com”) to our Google Apps domain (“@lsnc.net”). When we triggered the Google Apps full-account transition for a few early adopters, we didn’t think out in advance that those early adopters would no longer be recognized by the “@googlegroups.com” discussion groups, since for those few Google automatically changed the email addresses linked to the discussion groups to a temporary “transition” email address. As a result, those few users could not post to the group, although Google did forward messages from the group to their Google Apps Gmail accounts. What did we do when we realized what happened? We went into overdrive and completed the migration of all our Google Groups and brought them into our Google Apps domain.

Another simple example : You love Google Voice. Who doesn’t love Google Voice. According to Smarterware you cannot transfer your Google Voice number over to your new Google Apps account. But now it looks like Google will accept requests to transfer your Google Voice number if your organization has completed the full-account transition, although the user may need to wait a while.

May the transition be with you.

  • Friday
  • May 21
  • 2010

Groking Groups in Google Apps

What now seems like eons ago, and well before “Google Apps” even existed, LSNC relied on Yahoo! Groups for its first foray into email discussion lists. That relationship did not last long. In early 2006, LSNC made its first institutional move toward the Google-centric work style with adoption of Google Groups. The initial cluster of LSNC Google Groups included substantive discussion groups for housing, welfare, health and education, plus two announcement-type lists, one for all advocates and the other for all employees. We started with an opt-out approach for users, with the only exception being what we still call the “LSNC All” list, which was mandatory because of the importance of getting certain types of messages to everyone in the organization. At that stage LSNC still maintained its own mail server and spam was a growing problem.

Then later in 2006 came the standard edition of Google Apps, followed by more specificly marketed premium, business and education editions, as well as the non-profit edition adopted by LSNC. All editions offered the promise of practical integration of a basic complement of web applications: Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs. For LSNC the biggest initial advantage we saw with the Google Apps platform was the promise of Gmail on two counts: First, we could offer all staff universally web-accessible email; and second, based on the experiences of several staff who had long relied on their personal Gmail accounts, we were confident that Gmail’s preternatural ability to deal with email spam would solve that problem for us. It did. The switch over to Gmail also relieved LSNC of the need to maintain a mail server, much less all the security and spam filtering requirements that went with it. The larger institutional transition to Gmail was all but instantaneous and overall pretty painless. Google Calendar and Google Docs were actively promoted within LSNC, yet user transition toward those apps was slower, if steady. Use of Google Calendar within its first year of adoption became the norm and then eventually became an institutional requirement for all shared calendaring, such as local office and program-wide calendaring. It is now required for all individual calendaring within the organization.

But I digress. Back to Google Groups. Eventually LSNC made membership in most organizational discussion groups mandatory. For example, all advocates are required to be part of all LSNC substantive discussion groups, all office managers must be part of the special discussion groups created for office administrative matters and the separate list on technology issues, and so on.

Google Apps marches on! Last December Google Apps added Google Groups, and LSNC is just now laying its plans to transition users from the consumer version of Google Groups we have relied on for years, to this newer Google Apps corporate version. Broadly speaking, the Google Apps version of Google Groups looks and behaves pretty much like the other version. There are no real surprises in terms of user design here. But there are several significant differences below the surface, most of which relate to how Google Groups is intended to integrate with the larger Google Apps platform, as opposed to being a free-standing web app like the consumer version.

Three biggies come to mind:

1. Google Apps Google Group makes it enormously easier to manage multiple groups than does the consumer version. How so? Let’s say you want to create a discussion group or an announcement list for everyone within your organization. With Google Apps Google Groups you don’t have to do that manually. All you have to do is check a box to add all users within your domain. OK, say you have multiple substantive advocacy groups, like the ones described above. Within your domain you can now add or nest one discussion group membership list within another. For example, LSNC is creating one “master” list for all advocates, and that is the control point for assuring the membership list is correct and current. Then for other advocate-related lists, all we need to do is add the master advocate group address to the members list of the housing group or welfare group, and so on, with no need to update those membership lists because they are just nested versions of the advocate master list.

2. We’re talking user-managed groups now. If enabled this feature not only allows your users to create their own groups for discussion but perhaps just for ease of Gmail message distribution among a self-selected group of users. But it also does another important thing: It enables the owner of the group created to permit persons from outside the domain to participate in the group. For example, within LSNC there are small clusters of staffers who for organizational reasons use an entirely different domain for their Gmail. No problema. They can be added individually and directly to any of our domain’s Google Groups using this feature.

3. Finally, there is the Google Apps integration thing. The interface for the consumer version of Google Groups has sections for group “Pages” and uploaded “Files.” But you won’t find those in the corporate version of Google Groups. What’s with that? Well, if you need to create pages or upload files, then you need to do that with Google Docs and/or Google Sites and do a share to the group. I’m not saying that’s optimal. I’m saying that is the reality.

And as of this writing, there is a long unresolved bug in the corporate version of Google Groups affecting file attachments to email messages sent to the group. Yes, you can attach a file to an email message and it will appear linked within the group site. But, inexplicably, the content of any group message that has a file attachment does not get indexed and therefore is not searchable from within the group site. (File attachments themselves have never been searchable within any version of Google Groups. In contrast, files uploaded to Google Sites are.)

Then again, maybe that problem will get resolved once Google Apps implements unified search, which would be total Aces.

  • Sunday
  • March 21
  • 2010

Google Sites: A few features flying below your radar

There’s much to love about Google Apps for non-profits, and any organization that has adopted the Google Apps platform for any length of time has witnessed innumerable changes and improvements as Google cranks up its cluster of cloud apps for businesses, schools and non-profits. And Google has an even bigger push ahead throughout 2010 as it rolls out more changes to Google Apps to add big ticket items like Google Buzz, Google Voice, and Google Wave, plus as many as 200 other additional small features.

At times, keeping up with all these changes seems like a full-time job. To do so, I follow a dozen or so official Google blogs, including what I consider the single most essential of all, the quasi-weekly Google Apps Team official update feed. For organizations that have adopted the Google Apps platform, if you subscribe to one Google feed, that’s the one.

The constant flow of changes, updates and improvements to the Google Apps platform presents another dilemma: What features are you overlooking or underutilizing? To help advance the cause, here’s a few Google Sites features our organization has used that you may have overlooked or forgotten:

Re-purpose a site using “Copy this site”

Go to More actions » Manage Site » Site settings » General, and at the bottom you’ll see options for “Site Actions,” including one to “Copy this site.” Google Sites primarily promotes this feature as a way to copy other sites you are invited to. But, to coin a phrase, think outside the box: Use this feature to repurpose your own sites. Here are two other ways we’ve used this feature:

  • We copied an existing site within our own domain and used the site “copy” to experiment with and apply a visual redesign of the site “original”; once the redesign was completed, we just made the copy the functioning site for our users and deleted the original.
  • We created a site with a load of content that we later decided would work better for users if we broke the site into two sites. No problema. There is no need to re-create the second site manually. Just make a copy of the site, then trim the pages and files from each site that will be used in the other site. Done.

Use “Copy this site” to change the URL for a site within your domain

In an earlier iteration of Google Sites, there was an administrative option for changing a private site URL within your Google Sites domain, but that option has been removed. (Changing public site URLs involves different rubrics. Also users with site editing privileges can still change the URL for individual site pages under More actions » Page settings. But I digress.) You can get around this site URL renaming restriction by simply copying the site and giving it the new URL of your choice. Then just redirect your users to the new URL.

Leveraging the Google Sites template features

It is hard to think of a Google Site feature that is more practical — no, better said, all but indispensible — than the site template and within-site page template features. There is no need to recreate a site design or its page designs from scratch each time. Tweak your overall site design and work out the look and layout for each of its page types, and then save each page design as a page template. Then use the page template options to replicate the design as you add new pages or even change the page template for existing pages.

Google has recently added a slew of spiffy Google Sites templates, and has posted for download some of the Google-designed template image assets; and a template tips page with a helpful visual guide to how to create, edit and change various site page elements.

Applying a Google Site project template to an existing site

One problem with Google Sites templates (as opposed to Google Sites themes) is that they can only be used for newly created sites; you cannot apply a Google Sites template directly to an existing site. There is a work around, although it may require your using Firebug to sleuth out some of the template image elements.

To experiment with this technique, first copy your existing site, as described above. Using the site copy, go to Manage Site » Site appearance » Themes and apply either the default “Iceberg” theme (if you want the design to have a page-edge shadow) or the “Simple” theme (if a flat page design is what you have in mind.) Then select “Colors and fonts” to view those options for changing the site’s appearance. In a separate browser tab create a temporary site using the Google Site template of choice, and then navigate to “Colors and fonts” for that site, as well.

Now all you have to do is duplicate the color and font settings from the Google Sites template to your site copy. When viewing the settings for some background-image elements, you may be able to view the image directly by clicking on the “View image” link which should display the image in a new window. If it does, you can right-click the image and save it to your local desktop, and then upload it to the your site copy. For some templates, particularly for a Google-designed site, you may have to work harder and use something like Firebug to sniff out the path to the background images so you can open them up for viewing in a separate window. In either case, you will likely want to rename the files before you upload them so you can recall which image is which.

Customize your Google Sites search options

The owner of a particular site, as opposed to its viewers, has options to configure site search so users can search only that particular site or any combination of other domain Google Sites and/or public web sites. For example, our organization has configured two of our domain sites — one we call the “Core Content” with official content only, and the other the “Shared Document Repository” where all users can upload shared files by topic — so that users can search either the site they are at, the other site, or both sites, as illustrated here.

To configure the search options for your site, navigate to Manage Site » Site layout and click the “Configure search” button to the right, and go at it. This is a very easy, flexible way to give your users a wider set of search-target options suitable to the particular site.

  • Monday
  • November 16
  • 2009

Comparing TCO between Google Apps and MS Exchange

An initial caveat: This study was fully funded by Google. That said, for those in the legal services community debating the respective advantages and/or disadvantages of Google Apps verses MS Exchange may be interested to read Google Apps & Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 – Total Cost of Ownership Analysis.

(The study is posted at MC+A, our GSA consultant for The Findability Project.)

The cost numbers for Google Apps are premised on a business Premier account, costs which would be predictably less for non-profits relying on the Education edition of Google Apps.

  • Wednesday
  • May 20
  • 2009

Whoa! What happened to my Google Sites customization?

A few days ago Google pushed code for new features in Google Sites that noticeably affected some individual site customization. It certainly impacted ours, including an intranet-style content area that we customized using a fair amount of background images and inline CSS code styles.

Google has posted a helpful list of notable changes, worth reviewing if you are baffled about the what and why of your broken Google Sites customizations. For example, it states: “When you customize your site in the colors and fonts area this will override your inline html styles. Customized colors and fonts now trump inline styles.” Okay, that’s different as are several other things.

  • Sunday
  • May 17
  • 2009

How we organized our targeted Google Sites content

Since we’re on the subject of revisions and updates today, here’s another about how we finalized our Google Sites content.

As noted earlier, The Findability Project planned integration of select Google Sites content as a GSA target. How we created LSNC’s “official” intranet site with Google Sites was covered (briefly) as part of a recent NTAP presentation.

Since that presentation, we have pretty much completed the migration of all our intranet content over to what LSNC calls its “Shared Private Network” (SPN). For those curious, here is a screenshot of the current site’s home page; and here’s a screenshot of the top levels of the sitemap. As you can see, we have worked to keep the hierarchy simple which means manageable, especially given the number of different folks who have responsibility to maintain its content. Also, we have created a large number of Google Sites file cabinet “upload” pages to make management of those file easier, for the same reasons. So far, so good.

What is great about all this is that the GSA easily targets this selected Google Site, and returns great results from the site. Users can have it both ways, by searching from the GSA frontend but with equal ease from the native search function within the Google Site itself. It’s all good.

  • Sunday
  • April 26
  • 2009

Google Apps, SharePoint and this project

At the outset, let it be acknowledged that SharePoint is a great product. For good reason, many in the legal services community have either adopted or are at least seriously looking at SharePoint as a core component of their network infrastructure. A notable example of this trend from earlier this year is Tom Winter’s video collection of SharePoint Resources for Legal Aid. Impressive.

That said, observant followers of The Findability Project may have noticed our chronic inattention, and now outright de-emphasis of SharePoint. There’s a reason. Actually, several reasons.

When we submitted our TIG proposal in 2007, we proposed SharePoint as a key component of the technical specifications for this project. Once we received the grant in 2008, that is exactly how we proceeded as we put together our so-called blunt-instrument build. At the time, we put in place an open-source Google SharePoint connector that plays nicely with the Google Search Appliance (GSA). (We have documented how we configured the SharePoint side of things; we will eventually document how the Google connector configurations work.)

From the get-go we recognized the basic promise of SharePoint, i.e., it offers an array of enterprise platform options for creating and maintaining organizational portals and managing content. All stuff we wanted as we built out our project, moved toward positioning our content in very purposeful ways, and worked out optimal ways for our organization to communicate, share and find content. True, we were less sanguine about SharePoint’s enterprise search features. Not because it is not effective. It is. But we had greater confidence in the algorithms and effectiveness of Google enterprise search, which natively works with most everything Google, and SharePoint does not. But we will put that tribal view aside, for the moment. We give SharePoint its due: Impressive.

That was late 2007, early 2008. This is now, a little more than a year later. What happened in the interim? Google Apps happened … way more, way better Google Apps including an increasingly impressive array of collaboration features … including domain Google Sites … integration of Google Analytics into Google Apps … and then at the end of 2008 some serious happy with the version 5.2 update for the Google Search Appliance, which now integrates with Google Apps, including Google Sites.

Way impressive.

Even though we had SharePoint in place and could have built out our intranet using it, we all but immediately and instinctively moved on to Google Sites once it became available to us in 2008 and, in short order, built things out that way. (See Google Apps Redux for more about how LSNC currently uses Google Apps, including Google Sites.) It is not that SharePoint is not useful to accomplish many of the same things. It is. But at what cost and at what loss in usability?

For a modestly sized non-profit like ours (about 130 employees and two actual IT staff, not wannabees), the Google Apps platform has proven to be a phenomenal, secure, essentially zero-cost, zero-maintenance way to have access to pretty much all the basic collaborative and communication technologies now deemed baselines for the legal services community. (Oh, yeah, the baselines happened in 2008, also.)

And all this stuff works very nicely with the Google Search Appliance. SharePoint, not so much.

  • Wednesday
  • April 22
  • 2009

Using Google Docs shares to propagate tech help

Here’s a simple example of how we use Google Docs within our Google Apps domain to share tech solutions with all staff at LSNC:

Today we felt it was time to let our more ambitious users know how to do a bulk export of their Google Docs to their desktop or other location of choice. So we used Google Docs to create instructions on how to bulk export your Google Docs, with links to the applicable Firefox add-ons and a few basic screen captures to illustrate particular steps. The version of the document linked in this post is shared as a public web page, for illustrative purposes here, but internally what we actually do is simply make the document viewable by all within our domain, and then add a link to it to our endlessly exciting “Team Gizmo Updates” announcement page in Google Sites, plus link it to a special “Google Tools” page, also part of our Google Sites content.

All within our domain can now search for and/or navigate to the solution at our Google Sites. Fewer tech calls on this question. Everyone is happier.

  • Tuesday
  • March 31
  • 2009

Google Apps Redux

Last week I participated in an NTAP webinar offering a quick-hit intro to various Google applications. My segment was Google Apps specific, showing how LSNC now uses Google Sites as its “official” intranet site for what we call our “Secured Private Network.”

As a modest coda, without any accompanying audio but perhaps of interest as an example how easily one can create a presentation using Google Docs and then publish it to the Web, here are the slides I used during the presentation: Google Apps = Google Sites = Intranet. The slide presentation was created entirely within Google Docs. You should see options at the bottom of the viewport for viewing particular slides, and others options for printing the presentation as a PDF or a PPT, the latter being usable in PowerPoint if that is your druthers. Another useful action is the option to create a copy to Google Docs of the slide presentation, a feature that works in both your domain’s Google Apps or your personal Google account.

What are other ways might one use Google Apps? Among current examples I can think of within our organization, staff use Google Apps to do the following:

  • The forms feature in Google Docs is used by the executive office to track compliance by local offices when conducting California State Bar approved MCLE events.
  • Very commonly, individual staff use folders in Google Docs to maintain personal document collections on non-case projects, including originals created or shared within LSNC in Google Docs, as well as imported Word and PDF files from those outside LSNC.
  • Google Docs and Google Sites were used in combination by one office to create individual “workplan” spreadsheets which were then embedded in a Google Site used as the office’s work plan site. As staff updated their individual workplans, changes were displayed in real time at the shared Google Site.
  • Tech staff archive and share among themselves select pieces of reusable code for specific projects, e.g., the custom CSS code used for LSNC’s Secured Private Network site, Google Search Appliance configuration sets and parameters being used for The Findability Project, jQuery and other JavaScript code blocks being used for various LSNC web projects, and so on.
  • Vetting of proposed policies and protocols by doing Google Docs shares rather than using email attachment loops.
  • While LSNC still relies on the superb Basecamp platform for management of large-scale litigation and advocacy projects, advocates are being encouraged and have begun to create individual project management sites using Google Sites, even for projects with outside participants. For example, LSNC’s Race Equity Project has assembled an editorial team using Google Sites to co-ordinate the drafting of an upcoming Clearinghouse Review article on “framing” issues. The site is also used to archive notes and documents for the meetings and presentations that have been conducted as part of that drafting process.
  • Twenty five LSNC staffers, with representatives from all offices, formed their own “LSNC Greening Project.” How do they communicate and share information? They use Google Sites as their home base, in combo with Google Docs to share documents and a private Google Discussion Group to thrash things out. (They could simplify things by using the announcement page feature in Google Sites to conduct discussions, but that’s their call.)
  • Office managers use the forms feature in Google Docs to report changes to IT staff about required changes for personnel listings, Gmail changes, and additions and removals from discussion groups.
  • A pro bono component in one office has created an internal Google Site with multiple list pages for tracking case vignettes, available attorneys, cases assignments, contact information, dates assigned and completed, and so on. Everyone in the office working in support of pro bono cases has access to the site.

Just a few ideas among many in current use at LSNC. If you move to Google Apps, you’ll pretty quickly discover even more uses.

  • Monday
  • March 9
  • 2009

What you get if staff name your intranet

Once Google Sites got added to the Google Apps suite, Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC) almost immediately made the decision to migrate away from an existing MediaWiki installation to Google Sites to host its existing intranet content. Then and now that intranet location has been called the “Shared Private Network.” Within LSNC, everyone pretty much just calls it the SPN.

Since the tech team at LSNC (in-house known as “Team Gizmo”) believes in change you can, uh, believe in, they thought it would be a great idea to give LSNC staffers the opportunity to rename the SPN. And what better way to do it than have a contest (with a grand prize of a $30 Amazon.com gift certificate) open to all staffers, to submit their suggestions for a new name.

Game on!

Over a three-week contest period, Team Gizmo received a total of 47 suggestions for renaming LSNC’s shared network, including a late entry for which the time limit was waived because of the “quality” of the submission. Relying on contest standards that make American Idol look like the Nobel Prize, Team Gizmo brought its best “arbitrary and capricious” A-game to the task of reviewing all submissions.

There’s good news and bad news.

First, the good news: There was a winner, the who and why are explained, below. The bad news: Change is hard. Notwithstanding the number of submissions and the identification of a bona fide winner, the consensus (including the winner herself) was that no one came up with a name and/or acronym better than what has been used for so long, namely, Secured Private Network or SPN.

But, wait, there is the funny news: LSNC staffers largely approached this contest as an opportunity to showcase their sense of humor and delight with acronyms. Among the lessons learned:

  • Some senior managers clearly have too much time on their hands. One of them submitted more nominations than anyone else. We are compelled to acknowledge here his best suggestion: Ecretsay Tuffsay from LSNClay. (Yes, that was his best suggestion.)
  • There were several nominations suggesting some staffers are watching too much television, especially niche or defunct channels, like ION (Inter-Office Network) and UPN (Ultimate Private Network), which no doubt would have been well received if Star Trek Captain Janeway were a member of Team Gizmo. She’s not.
  • Without naming names, the LSNC Auburn Office is apparently busting at the seams with galactic vision, with its suggestions that included CSN (Cosmic Stellar Network), SCN (Stellar Cosmic Network), LSNCU (LSNC Universe) and PLSNC (Planet LSNC). No doubt the Auburn Office will be closed on May 8 for interplanetary repairs.)
  • That only scratches the surface of the many clever acronyms LSNC staffers came up with. Among more serious ones were LINE (LSNC IntraNet Experience), PIN (Private Information Network) and SNAP (Secure Network All Private). But there were a slew of funny ones, as well, including IPHOM (I Pay Homage to the Machine), LOLS (Lots of LSNC Stuff) and a hearty bottoms-up to PILSNER (Private Intranet Legal Services Network Employee Resource).
  • Some of the best submissions weren’t about acronyms, they were just… well, you decide:
    • CASPER, as in the friendly ghost. I have my reasons.
    • www.thisisthegreatestthingihaveeverseenandicouldnotlivewithoutit.com
    • The No SPN Zone
    • … and a personal Team Gizmo favorite: That thingy online where we get all the stuff

The winner? It came from a bookkeeper in the Finance Department, who submitted SPUNK (Super People United as Networked Kin). Are we going to use it? No. That said, it is a funny, clever and catchy acronym that melds notions of intranet purpose and functionality with an empowering sense of organizational esprit de corps, don’t you think?

Bottom line: The best $30 tech investment at LSNC. Ever.

  • Thursday
  • February 26
  • 2009

Comparing Google Sites and GSA search results with release 5.2 in place

All went well with the GSA version 5.2 update. The update itself is a humongous 1.53 GB ISO file that, once burned to a DVD disc and loaded, took about 6 hours to install. As recommended, we did a complete crawl refresh which, in our case, took another 72 hours. Other than this considerable but necessary time investment, we had no real problems with the update process.

As mentioned in an earlier post, the principal attraction of this most recent GSA update was the integration of Google Apps, which enables targeting of domain-hosted Google Docs and Google Sites. In that regard we are pleased to report no problema, as well.

In version GSA 5.2 the administrator now sees a menu option for “Google Apps Integration” with a single field for enabling or disabling one’s Google Apps domain as a GSA target:

With Google Apps targeted generally, then it is a matter of constructing URL patterns to include or exclude more specifically what you want targeted within your Google Apps. In our case, that meant our selection of specific Google Sites now serving as our organization’s intranet content platform. More specifically our search goal was to have the GSA index not just pages within those Google Sites but, as importantly, files uploaded to those Google Sites.

There are differences in how search results display between those performed from within Google Sites and those from a GSA frontend. If a search is done from within Sites, it will find and return a search result for keywords or phrases within an uploaded file, but not display the context of the keywords or phrase. For example, using the search law school+"reimburse me" one gets this specific PDF search result from within Google Sites:

The same search done from our test GSA frontend that returns results from everything targeted by our GSA, yields the same search result while showing the keywords and phrase in context:

So, the basic differences in how search results display are these:

An internal Google Site search will find and return results based on keywords and/or phrase within a file uploaded to Google Sites, display the filetype as an icon (in the above example, with a PDF icon), display the link using the file name, but not display the keywords or phrases in context.

In contrast, the GSA search result will find and return the same result but display the keywords and/or phrase in context, display the filetype as an acronym (e.g., “PDF”), and display the link as what the algorithm discerns as the document’s title (in this example, “Law School Loan Reimbursement Request Form”).

  • Monday
  • February 23
  • 2009

Migrating from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps

Since this is getting a promotional push from the Official Google Enterprise Blog, the outcome of the story is predictably a successful one. Nonetheless, here it is: Making the switch: Migrating 3,000 users from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps, and what one company learned, a sixty- minute online presentation next Monday. May be of interest to those legal services and other non-profit organizations still pondering whether it makes sense to move away from Exchange and go the Google Apps route.

  • Tuesday
  • February 10
  • 2009

The Google Apps official update feed

Given the centrality of all things Google to many of our work lives, and like many others within the legal services community, I use Google Reader to follow — which is to say, scan — 20 “Google” blogs, which means 13 of the innumerable official Google Blogs and seven unofficial blogs. This is fairly easy to do because postings at these blogs, official and unofficial, tend to be very duplicative of each other, with Google breathlessly announcing new features in multiples across its various, often overlapping blogs, and the unofficial blogs recycling the same announcements in one variation or another. And following all this Google stuff is especially worthwhile if your organziation, like LSNC, has adopted Google Apps. That you already know.

But what you may not know is that Google Apps has a low-profile announcement feed, not really a “blog,” as such, called the official update feed from the Google Apps team. For example, this from a few days ago:

Lean, to the point, what I need to know.

This is an example of what I was describing a few posts back, namely, there are a handful of feeds I absolutely, positively want to make sure hit my Inbox because I really, really want to make sure I know about this stuff for our organization, and want to make sure it doesn’t get lost to consciousness as I am getting hosed by all the other feeds I follow in Google Reader.

  • Friday
  • January 23
  • 2009

Why we like GSA release 5.2: Google Apps integration

A few weeks ago Google Enterprise issued Release 5.2, the latest software update for model GB-1001, the one we are using on this project.

There are a slew of new features in Release 5.2, but there are a couple that are making for some serious happy on this project. The most significant is that, with the update, the GSA now integrates with Google Apps. For those interested, the Google Code site has a detailed explanation of how that works.

For us this is huge. Our modest non-profit organization two years ago adopted Google Apps as a basic building block for a functional, practical, web-based enterprise environment, something we never really had before. (Hey, there are intranets and then there are intranets.) The Google Sites and Google Docs pieces of the no-cost non-profit Google Apps service are a big part of that. And as part of this project, we have moved pretty much all of our existing intranet content over to Google Sites, and use of shared Google Docs throughout the organization is increasing steadily. (Use of the forms features in Google Docs is especially popular among our office managers.)

Before the Release 5.2 update, we had made valiant stabs at getting the GSA to index our Google Sites content, but with muddled success; and with uploaded files, at best it would only return results with keywords that showed up in uploaded files names, not the file content. Now the GSA integrates directly and we can target any “public” Google Sites or Google Docs content we share with others within our domain. (There is some ambiguity in how Google describes GSA integration about so-called “public Google Sites and Google Docs.” To clarify the point, in this context “public” is a Google term-of-art. If you create a Google Site or Google Docs within your domain’s Google Apps and share it with everyone within your domain, then it is “public.” It is not necessary to make that content public to the world.)

The other Release 5.2 feature we are especially excited about is its enhanced advanced search reporting. Now we have a built-in tool that enables us to analyze user search behavior, with reports that “list every query and click made by every user,” plus whether users are finding what they search for within three clicks, or not at all, and which part of the search interface the users, uh, actually use. Aces!

One caveat we are aware of from GSA groups discussions: Release 5.2 is a significant update with features that may warrant a serious review of one’s existing XSLT modifications, to exploit new GSA feature sets. And we have been advised to do a complete crawl refresh. We’ll report back here how it all goes.

  • Monday
  • December 8
  • 2008

Gmail workaday: The sequel

As suggested last week, Gmail seems to be emerging as the prevailing point of engagement for many of us using Google Apps. As if on cue, today Lifehacker highlighted the Integrated Gmail Firefox extension that loads any Google App inside Gmail. Not that I am recommending that particular extension. But it goes in the same Google Apps direction so many of us are going, namely, relying on the Gmail UI as the point of first entry to Google Apps.

  • Wednesday
  • December 3
  • 2008

Gmail as your workaday gateway

It has been fascinating to watch the evolution of the user interface changes as the various Google Apps and other Google tools evolve, and none more so than Gmail. Email, uh, Gmail is the core web application for Google Apps users. They may or may not regularly use Google Docs or Google Chat or Google Sites or Google Reader, whatever… but you can pretty much count on your organization’s users relying on the Gmail interface to get basic work done. And with steady additions to the Gmail Labs features and now direct gadget integration into the Gmail interface — for example, the recent additions of Calendar and Docs gadgets that display directly within Gmail – the Gmail UI is evolving as a primary workaday dashboard for integrating and accessing an array of Google applications and tools.

Here’s a particularly interesting description of how one person does it: Making Gmail Your Gateway to the Web. You could make the case that what he really needs to do is get a life, but regardless he has come up with several very smart and creative ways to exploit Gmail to help organize, access and communicate.

  • Wednesday
  • January 2
  • 2008

Turning on Gmail 2.0 for Google Apps

This is not exactly new news, since it is a new Google Apps option I had not noticed when it was implemented two weeks ago. But for those who have adopted Google Apps for their organizations, it will be of interest: Google Apps administrators now have the option of changing the system default so that newly enhanced features in various Google applications that have already been implemented in the “consumer” versions are automatically implemented in your organization’s Google Apps. No more waiting for Google Apps upgrades, people!

About two months ago Google rolled out Gmail 2.0 to its “consumer” Gmail accounts with a host of enhanced features. Of course, the proverbial problem for Google Apps users is that changes made in the consumer version of Google applications can take a long, long time to migrate to the Google Apps versions. Well, in response to demand, Google now permits Google Apps administrators to opt-in to the changes immediately.

To do so, go to your Google Apps control panel and select Domain settings > General > Control Panel. At the bottom be sure to select both “Next generation” and “Turn on new application features to my domain before they are rolled out to all Google Apps customers,” as illustrated here:

Google Apps control panel

I turned ours on today. It took only about 4 hours to kick in. Nice, very nice. Really dig the way improved Contact Manager.

  • Sunday
  • July 29
  • 2007

Turn off those ads in NPO Google Apps. Please.

Most of the feature enrichment that comes with the free Google Apps Education Edition, also available to 501(c)(3) non-profits, impact the few that manage (easily) the Google Apps account because the features are system-level enhancements for email migration, single login security and API tweakers. But one feature you are certain to want to exploit for the benefit of all your users is the option to turn off all linked ads in all the Google Apps services (Gmail, Calendar and Docs & and Spreadsheets). Your people will love you for it because it noticeably reduces the optical noise for the user reading the message. Here’s a real-world example of the before and after:

Got someone on deck who actually wants the ads? Tell ‘em to get their own Gmail account.

  • Sunday
  • July 1
  • 2007

Being about the newest tweaks for Google Apps

At the risk of reinforcing the view some have that all I do is twiddle with Google stuff all day (I don’t), I weigh in here with yet another Google post to mention a few low-profile tweaks implemented last week in the free “standard” Google Apps configuration used by LSNC. LSNC relies on Google Apps primarily for domain-hosted Gmail, but also as a vehicle for promoting use of web-based individual and collaborative tools, principally Google Calendar, Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Google Notebook, all of which have integrated “sharing” features. Google Apps is not the cure for cancer, but it has a lot to recommend it for non-profits ready to tap its various, typically (but not always) user friendly features at essentially no cost and with minimal maintenance effort.

The latest Google Apps tweaks are modest but helpful and worth noting. Some, most notably the email migration feature, are not freebies. But even the Google App minimalists like us got several real goodies:

Shared LSNC Contacts: OMG! (Oh my Google!) Domain-hosted Gmail now offers a system-level share-contacts option that automatically integrates all domain email addresses into one’s Gmail “contacts.” What this means in practice is hugely helpful. LSNC staff no longer need to add or delete LSNC domain email addresses to their Gmail contacts. The names and email addresses are just there (or not, as staff are removed from the domain). Now when composing I just begin typing the first few letters of any LSNC staffer’s name or email address and Gmail offers it as an option to insert as an email address, without my ever needing to add them to contacts.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets Integration: Since the get-go, our version of the free Google Apps has always included Google Gmail and Google Calendar. Well, last week Google finally integrated its wonderful Google Docs & Spreadsheets features directly into the mix. Now we have direct access to Google Docs from within our LSNC Gmail accounts without having to login separately. Sweet.

(Never used Google Docs? Check out the Google Docs & Spreadsheets video training, a product overview that also explains how you can use it to collaborate with others. Think of the possibilities.)

Option to Open Word documents and Excel spreadsheets in Google Docs: It gets even better, although this is a feature that has long been available in premium versions of Google Apps but only debuted in the freebie version last week. Now that the standard version of Google Apps integrates Google Docs, whenever you receive a Microsoft Word document or an Excel spreadsheet as a file attachment, you will now see a link at the bottom of the Gmail message for opening the attached file directly into Google Docs.

Option to View PowerPoint Slide Shows: This is a new feature for all. If someone sends you a PowerPoint presentation as a file attachment, you will now see a link at the bottom of the Gmail message for viewing the slide show within your web browser. No, you do not need PowerPoint installed on your computer. Really. It works.

While viewing PowerPoints in Gmail this way is new, Gmail has long offered similar functionality for a slew of other file types.

  • Monday
  • April 30
  • 2007

Brief update re freebie Google apps

Well, at least I’ll try and keep it brief. It’s like this:

A few weeks back in my Google miscellany post I alluded to the practical reality that some Gmail features in the freebie version of Google Apps lag some behind regular Gmail service and, presumably, the for-cost versions of Google Apps. The good news today is that it looks like Google has finally implemented mail fetcher in its freebie version of domain-hosted Gmail, or at least it has done so for ours:

This development prompted choruses of “Oh Happy Day” among some LSNC staffers. They now have multiple ways to manage and manipulate their domain-hosted Gmail, including:

  • Automatically forward all of one’s individual Gmail to another email address;
  • Automatically forward selected emails using Gmail filters;
  • Configure Gmail to do POP3 downloads of all of one’s Gmail to an external email application like Outlook (whatever); and/or
  • Use mail fetcher to download via POP3 up to five other email accounts directly into to one’s Gmail account.

One additional note: If you go the freebie route with Google Apps, you don’t get all the optimal integration of the various apps that for-cost Google Apps seems to be promising. And in the freebie version, this slight is compounded somewhat by a misleading “more” link that suggests but doesn’t deliver anything more than a laundry list of Google apps and services. Here’s a better way to go for the freebies among us: Assuming you have set up a general Google account using your domain-hosted Gmail account, quick click to get to the Google home page and then in the upper right-hand corner click on “My Account.” Bingo! That link takes you to a comprehensive list of links to all your personal Google services linked to your email address:

  • Wednesday
  • April 18
  • 2007

Google offers apps training presentations

Not long after posting my earlier item about the Google Apps promo demo, I was poking around in the help files for Google Apps Administrators and noticed on the left under “Learning Center” that Google has put online a set of app-specific video/audio/slide show presentations for each app (using Macromedia Breeze, now known as Adobe Connect). Depending on your intended audience, or even if you just want to get a feel for how these apps work, these online presentations may be helpful for those needing basic orientation on the feature sets in and how to use:

Enjoy!

  • Wednesday
  • April 18
  • 2007

The Google Apps lifestyle

Rajen Sheth Demonstrates Google Apps is a 17-minute YouTube promo demo piece by Google to draw attention to its Google Apps business model, but nonetheless it is an interesting and effective overview of how basic fetaures in Gmail, Gmail Chat, Google Calendar and Google Docs relate and play with each other. A nice bit to share with others still scratching their heads wondering “What’s with all this ‘web collaboration’ thing people keep talking about?” (As you watch it, be aware that the demo is based on the Google Apps premium edition. If you go for the freebie model, at present only Gmail, Google Calendar and a stripped down version of the Start Page are integrated.)