WebedtecH

So you think you’ve finished all the planning for your new intranet and you’re ready to get to the building part.  Not so fast there…there’s still more thinking to come.

Concentrating on the problem solving

You have identified the specific needs you have to meet for your intranet to be successful, but now you have to figure how to accomplish those objectives with the tools at hand.  Personally this is one of the reasons why I love these types of browser based tools.  They force you to think creatively rather than running the code to just make it do whatever you want.

Let’s start reviewing some of the functionality you are likely to address in building out your site:

• Document management
• Lists of information
• Reference materials
• Discussions
• Links

There are a lot more that we’ll address later but this is a good list of things to get us going.

Document management

Generating documents is part of the lifeblood of most organizations and I’m sure yours is no different.  The challenge comes with keeping everyone on the same page when working with documents as part of the team.  There’s two main parts to this: editing documents and accessing documents.  Editing documents collaboratively online is the strength of Google Apps for documents and spreadsheets.  I’ll leave the focus on how to do that work there.  The strength of Google Sites when it comes to documents is the File Cabinet feature and embedding documents.

File Cabinets in Google Apps give you a place to upload documents to and organize them within folders.  Unfortunately there is little security there beyond the site level security.  In one of my later articles you’ll see that security in Google Apps is dependent on creating lots of small, targeted sites and weaving them together.

When planning your File Cabinets, think topically. You can only create one level of folders in each cabinet, so plan around a cabinet holding one topic area of information. It will make it easier for your users to recognize what is in the cabinet right away. For example a cabinet labeled “Forms” should hold only that, various forms broken down into folders. It’s fine to have a number of filing cabinets in your site, or even have sites that are nothing more than filing cabinets. Another example is if you wanted to have HR forms all in one place setting them up as their own site with read only access for most users is an effective solution rather than trying to manage them as part of a larger site.

Lists of information

There are a couple of ways to handle lists of information in Google Apps. One is to use the List page in Google Apps to create a basic structure of sortable fields. If you need a quick and dirty list of things such as to-do items or a phone directory this is a good way to go. If you need something more robust I suggest you create your list in Google Apps spreadsheet and embed the spreadsheet into your site. It is much more powerful and versatile than the built in list function.

Reference Materials

This is one of the times I recommend using the internal functions of the site over an outside application. Google Apps do not have a wiki function, but the Pages can be tied together in a way to make them very user friendly. Procedural documentation, policies, guidelines, anything that may need to be updated easily are good candidates to be a Page in a Google Apps intranet. One of the larger advantages is the ability to attach files and comments to the pages, making them truly living documents.

Discussions

Email is a critical part of our operations and instant messaging services such as Google Talk and Twiter are becoming just as valuable. Discussions in Google Apps take this to another level by making the conversation public to all the site members. Unfortunately, unlike other systems there aren’t any “discussion lists” within Google Apps. What’s a site administrator to do? Use the Announcements option instead, of course.

By using the Announcements option each new announcement becomes the beginning of a message thread and the comments are the responses. It’s a great way to leverage a feature in Google Apps for something different than it was designed for while still meeting a significant need. An example of this is using an Announcements list for a Q&A section in your site where users post their questions as announcements and your answers are the comments. You can subscribe to the list and always be in the loop on what your users need to know.

Links

By using the List page template you can create indexes of links for your users that act as supplementary navigation, reference lists, tables of contents, and more. If you are going to have a number of links in a list (20 or more) I suggest adding a category field that you can sort by so people can find the links they are looking for quickly and easily.

We’ve covered some of the basic components your intranet may need. Next is one of the more complicated aspects of Google Apps sites…navigation within a site and across multiple sites.

GTD and other systems have leveraged the concept of contexts for a long time. These are the places that actions should be taken, for example @home, @computer, or @phone. It makes it simple to find things to take off your to-do list in groups when you can filter them by where you are.

Evernote Mobile gives you the ability to add tags to your captured items and then search for those tags. If you are using Windows Mobile as I am and capture a text note you can tap on:

Then add a title by selecting Options and Edit Title.

Once you have added a title select Options and Assign tags to add your context to your note.

Now when you create your note and synchronize it with Evernote the context will be pushed up as a tag and can be reference from the desktop, searched from the web, or used to locate all the related notes while mobile as you see below:

You can see that by searching for the context “@grocery” I can find all the notes applicable to that location.  Yet another way Evernote Mobile can help you keep your information organized quickly and easily.  Love this tool.

Note – when searching from your mobile device the system won’t filter on the “@” so you will get back any notes containing the text part of your context.  Not perfect but way better than nothing.

When someone asks you, “What’s the best way to capture and organize my notes?”  I answer with a question: how do you want to use them in the future?  You see, capturing notes is a very personal process not only assisting in memory retention but requiring a method that matches the recorder’s way of thinking for easy recall.  Every major personal productivity guru on the planet dictates that one of the linchpins of success is the capture of information quickly, accurately, and efficiently.  This always raises the battle, “paper or computer?”  I do not believe the two are mutually exclusive and with a little introspection you can find a balance between the written and the typed.

As you can tell from some of my other posts I have been a long time pen and notebook fan.  Additionally I have used PDAs for years.  The shift back and forth between the two platforms has taken me to both extremes:  all paper to all digital and in-between.  Where I find myself now is in-between both solutions but this time I have done it on purpose.  Using Evernote I have found the way to write my notes and retrieve them too.

Here’s the dilemma.  Keeping your notes in wonderful notebooks like a Moleskine causes a problem with retrieving them when you need them, especially if you go through a lot of notebooks like I do.  So the question is how do I take prolific notes yet  keep them all at my fingertips?  That’s where Evernote comes in.  I use my home scanner to scan each relevant page in my notebook into Evernote and then tag and mark the record accordingly.  Having done that I can recall the information from my phone or desktop at any time without having to keep all the notebooks with me.  The added bonus is the notebooks act as a permanent record and backup of the information.

This model is pushing me towards the direction of notebooks with removable pages like the Rollabind line or ones small enough to fit two pages on an 8 1/2 x 11″ sheet of paper.  In either case, I feel free to write as much as I want knowing I will be able to store and retrieve as I see fit.  This is liberating in the sense that creation of content on the computer can be transitive and linear, whereas pen on paper feels permanent yet fluid.

Would I choose between them?  If I were forced…I would have to go the paper route.  Beyond my own personal preferences it is easy enough to set up an organizational system on paper and retain the records as long as you need to.  Yes digital can do the same but paper never runs out of power.  With the right ink and paper they can be forgiving to water in ways bits and bytes cannot.

One of the challenges I have faced is keeping all of the facets of my schedule synchronized. Between work, family, and other interests, maintaining multiple schedules can take as much time as the activities on the schedules. No matter where I am I need to know my work, family, and school schedule on demand. One step towards solving this has been getting all the calendar information to one calendar…in this case it’s Google Calendar.

Since all my events now filter to one calendar it just became a matter of getting that calendar onto my phone in a regular, reliable manner. In came GooSync to solve the problem and address my contacts and todos as well. Here’s how it works for me:

GooSync is a two part application. One part is loaded on the phone to schedule the connection to the web based account and control the sync on this end. The second part is the web account that is connected to my Google Calendar, Google Contacts and GooSync task list (they don’t support Google Tasks yet because there’s no API, but I’m sure they will when it’s ready.) The GooSync application runs on a scheduled sync to pull and push events from my Google Calendar. Now there are other applications out there that do similar but I have found the GooSync app to be exceptionally adept at handling multiple calendars from Google. My entries on my phone begin with [Fam] or [V95] or [CCS] for family, crew, or school events. Even better if I want to enter an event to show up on one of those calendars (which are shared with other people) I can create an entry beginning with one of those tags and it is pushed directly to that calendar. Definitely a time saver for shared group calendars.

My contact listing, while not miles long as many people have, is a vital part of my communications and organization. I like to keep only one list and have it accessible from multiple spots. GooSync channels my Google contact list to my phone and back again. It’s a simple enough concept but at least now I know when I email from Gmail or through my phone, I have the same list of people and addresses.

Finally…my task list. I was a user of Remember the Milk for a long time, but experienced a disappointing letdown in their sync support so I abandonded that ship. I use GooSync’s task manager now on the web side and my phone when mobile. The GooSync solution is effective because it meshes well with the category functions on the phone as well as offering a new Google gadget for my iGoogle page to manage my tasks from the computer.

Lots of moving parts that need to be kept working together. Sounds like the story of most of our lives. In this case, GooSync is the solution I’ve found that keeps the wheels turning for me.

I’ve used  this same notebook for a while and the only defect I found was the pocket in  the back…but for a different reason.  Over time due to  the flexible nature of the notebook the seam along the bottom edge of the pocket split requiring me to tape up the edge so the contents did not slide out.

Perhaps it’s a flaw just due to the bending and flexing but it is a downside to an otherwise very nice little notebook.  I’ll buy more, but I’ll make a point of reinforcing that pocket edge before I put anything in there.

Miquelrius Flexible Notebook.