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.

Do your teachers and staff have the tools necessary to work together as a team?  Considering building an intranet?  That’s what we’re doing and I’ll explain how.  The amount of power and functionality that a school has access to through a system such as Google Apps gives a great opportunity to build a collaborative workspace for teachers and staff with virtually no cost.  However the idea isn’t without it’s challenges.  When planning any sort of collaborative web effort, I recommend starting with three key questions:

1. What do you NEED to do?
2. What do you WANT to do?
3. HOW do you want to do it?

The first question is without a doubt the most important.  The second and third will change, even be discarded, if they don’t meet the requirements of the first one.  Our needs right now are simple:

1. A central location for forms and reference materials that can be accessed by any staff member on or off the network.
2. A shared location for policies and procedures (currently we use a network drive)
3. A simple way to keep said policies and procedures current for everyone needing access

Now this set of needs could be served by any number of solutions so we’re still at an impass.  On to question 2…what do we WANT?

1. A system that is easy to use
2. Integrated with our current email system
3. Available from anywhere
4. Reliable
5. Adaptable
6. Minimal (no) cost

Not much more specific, but it does point out some key requirements in narrowing the field.  For example, “integrated with our current email system” points towards Google Apps since it is what we have been using for email for two years very successfully.    Also, “available from everywhere” eliminates most network centric solutions and points us back to the cloud.

Finally we come to the HOW.  This can be a tough one since by this point you still have a couple of options left on the table and you need to do a critical analysis, cost-benefit comparison, etc.  For us this was made a great deal simpler by the last WANT…minimal (no) cost.  Looks like we’ll be building our intranet with Google Sites and Google Apps.

Next…functional requirements.

We are in the midst of a project requiring us to ask our parents and staff a series of questions and aggregate the results in a very short period of time…and for free. We’ve used SurveyMonkey and others of that ilk in the past but I thought this would be a great opportunity to use the Form function in Google Spreadsheets.

Here’s how it worked. We created the form in Google Apps using the New: Form option. It’s a basic questionnaire with only six questions. All but one question is a rating scale response, in this case a scale from one to four. The form was ready within 15 minutes and I created a TinyURL pointing to the form to be emailed to the survey respondents.

Here’s where we hit a snag. No matter how I set the access permissions on the survey it kept asking users to log into Google Apps to complete the questions. Now since this is NOT what we wanted we needed a workaround. Our solution was a hidden content page on the school web site with an embedded copy of the form (there’s a button that generates the Javascript for copy and paste ease) and then send the link to that page to the recipients. Bingo! Responses started to flow in.

I would be interested to see if anyone is willing to take a stab at creating a quiz or test for students using the same methodology (or has already and is willing to share).