Google Sites 3: Using Google Sites to Simplify Processes

I had a lively conversation recently with Karol Markosky (part of which I discussed in the last post). She works at the Council of Senior Centers and Services of New York City (CSCS) and attended a presentation I did last May at NPower NY: “Could a Wiki Help Your Organization?” In the interim she has helped structure and launch various wikis for the small non-profit she works for. She showed me one of them.

Coordinating a Cross-Agency Project
She herself runs the HIV Older Adults Initiative and partners with a number of different organizations. They needed a more seamless way to communicate: 1) to track the trainings that her program coordinates; 2) to track the program goal of covering each of NYC’s 51 City Council districts each year and 3) to share up-to-date training materials and a calendar.

Using Google Sites "Pages"
After looking at a few different wiki platforms, Karol played around with Google Sites. As she did it became clear how she might simplify her work by using some of the types of pages Google Sites offers.

As noted a few posts ago, the blank page of a wiki offers a lot of flexibility, but not always a lot of functionality and structure, or direction for the user.

While other wikis offer page templates when you create a page (for example PBWiki and Socialtext), Google Sites has gone a step further. When you click “Create New Page,” it offers, what I would call, different "types" of page.

(Note: Click on images for a full screen view.)

Using a "List" Page
To fulfill the goal of covering each of NYC’s 51 City Council districts, Karol wanted an easy way to assess which council districts had already had trainings.

This is what she came up with:

Now at a glance Karol can answer such questions as “Are we a ¼ of the way done?”

How’d she do it?

She chose to create a custom list page but she also could have chosen one of the three list page templates that Google offers.

1. Action Items—“Keep track of action items from a project or meeting”
   
2. Issue List—“Track your project’s open issues”
3. Unit Status—“Track the status of individual units in your project”
   

Participants who have been added to the site as a “collaborator” or “owner” can add to and edit the list (“viewers” can simply look at it) via a simple dialogue box that pops up when you either “Add item” or click a pre-existing item to edit it. Agency partners have the responsibility to add the information as the trainings happen.

Using the "File Cabinet"


So that the project could get away from the often confusing practice of repeatedly emailing the latest version of updated paperwork such as registration forms, case studies, and other training materials, Karol used Google Site’s File Cabinet page which allows you to upload documents into folders and supports version control.


Embedding Google Docs and Calendar
When creating a page in Google Sites, if you don’t pick one of the preformatted types of pages such as a List page, or a File Cabinet page and simply pick the “webpage” (a blank wiki page), one of the things you can do is embed Google Documents and calendars in it. Karol took great advantage of this and embedded a Google Form.

Here’s why she used a form:

In their work of setting up trainings there was a “massive data collection issue.”

• Each person used to send an email to the master spreadsheet holder
• ...with information on the over 20 fields to keep track of
  
• The master spreadsheet holder would manually enter the data
• ...and then the spreadsheet would be sent around via email to be shared.
  

Now the form Karol created allows each person to add their own data and the administrators can download the spreadsheet that is automatically populated with the form data. Here’s a screenshot of the first few fields of the form.


You create the form in Google Docs and then simply hit insert on your Google Sites webpage, and it is embedded.

Blogging on Google Sites
While Karol isn’t using the blog functionality yet on this specific site, you can create as many blogs as you want inside your Google Site. One of the preformatted page types is called “Announcements,” and works exactly like a blog, with dated posts.

Putting it All Together

Finally, here’s the homepage as it stands today.
Karol used one of the “themes” Google offers and then customized it further via “Colors and Fonts” choices. She said, “Data entry is not always happy - you need a happy color.”

Nate Nash of BearingPoint, in one of my favorite case study webinars, talked about the "sheer mechanical advantage" of editing a wiki page as opposed to getting a spreadsheet in an email, downloading it, editing it, and then resending or uploading it.

It's a similar advantage in large organizations like BearingPoint or in smaller organizations like CSCS. Via list pages, a file cabinet, and a centralized, viewable form for data entry, it seems to me CSCS has streamlined some of their daily chores, allowing them to concentrate on delivering services. I'll check in with Karol in some months and see how their wiki experiment has evolved. (And actually, soon I will re-report on their sign-in issues.)

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More About CSCS’s Google Sites

Business Issues That Gave Rise to Use of Google Sites

• Coordinating many trainings across organizational boundaries
• Initial success with simply sharing a Google Calendar raised the question: “What more could we simplify?”
• Need for a way to deal with constantly re-edited documents—internally and externally- making it easier to find the latest version of a document

Caveats

• Gadgets (widgets) that one can embed are mostly “fluff,” not necessarily appropriate for a business site; “the ones that weren’t fluff were kind of funky”

How have the wiki sites been received?

• “Mix of excitement and what do I do with this?”
• First time Karol sent a link to a form-response “This is very cool—we need to do this.”
• Gradually getting used to it; it usually takes time for a change
• One colleague said, “I check it every day. Once I start setting pieces up, I can’t wait to use it.”

Lessons Learned

• Find a way to back up data you are storing on a free hosted site, in case the worst happens and you lose your data or lose access to your data
  
• Play with each piece of functionality and you’ll get ideas how you might be able to use it: “I played with the List page and an idea formed in my head.”
• Keep it simple so new users won’t be overwhelmed
• Find a way to back up data you are storing on a free hosted site
  

Looking Forward To:

• If, and when, Google adds page permissioning. (Currently users get permissions to view, collaborate, or own the whole site.)

Google Sites 2: A Sign-In Issue

One of the reasons why the ad for Google Sites caught my eye on Google’s home page was that I had just had a conversation with Karol Markosky who had built some wikis on Google Sites. She works at the Council of Senior Centers and Services of New York City (CSCS).

Before we looked at one of her wikis together, she told me a story that has still not come to its conclusion.

Some staff members are having sign-in problems and are unable to access some of the wikis they have created. Their hypothesis is that somehow their domain name cscs-ny.org is “wrapped” into Google Apps. But they had never signed up for Google Apps.

“It’s almost like 2 accounts were created under the same email address and sometimes when you type in your email address you get account A—which will let you sign in-- and sometimes account B—which won’t.”

CSCS has been trying to understand and rectify this for three months--but using a free service with Google (Google Sites) has meant, so far, there is little recourse. (Having never signed up for Google Apps means they do not qualify for the free phone support for "critical issues" that Steve Backman mentions when discussing being blocked from Gmail in one of his posts on the Idealware blog).

Through a colleague of a colleague, they have reached a human at Google, but not a human who knows anything about the issue. CSCS thinks it is possible they will have to abandon a few of the wikis they created since the administrator and the majority of participants cannot access them.

I will update this when I hear more, though if anyone can shed light, please do.

I suppose considering CSCS may have to abandon one of the inaccessible wikis, they are lucky that both for simplicity’s sake and because Google Sites doesn't currently allow page level permissioning, they chose to create a series of wikis for different users and projects, instead of one large wiki.

Google Sites 1: A Wiki is Just a Website

On January 28th I noticed that Google was advertising what I think of as their wiki product, Google Sites, on their homepage at google.com. (It was gone by the 29th.) “New! Get your own website on Google Sites. It’s free and easy.” If you clicked through, here was the screen you got:

The word “wiki” was nowhere in sight.

And, indeed, a hosted wiki is a “free and easy way to create and share webpages.”

I’m not a student of Google but I guess that their brand is about simplifying to drive mass adoption. Perhaps that's a good lesson in how to be very clear and simple when explaining the what and how of collaborative software.

On the other hand, it's likely that Google knows that everyone wants a website and only a small percentage of people are really clamoring for a wiki. Yet, it's the same thing (in many ways) but I don't think I have fully internalized this myself.