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”).

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.

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.

We wanted you to be the 878,444th person to know, so we’re going to post it here:

Google Enterprise today announced the arrival of offline Gmail, the latest feature in the Labs settings of Google Apps Gmail. It ain’t perfect, but basically works.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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

Hot damn! Google has announced that Google Apps non-profit accounts now have access to its email migration tools. Apparently this newly updated API can handle email account migration from anywhere, not just IMAP as had previously been the case. Good news, people.

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.

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.

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:

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:

• Intro to Google Apps
• Google Start Page
• Gmail
• Google Docs & Spreadsheets
• Google Calendar

Enjoy!

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.)