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.

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.

(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.

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.