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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”).