Collaborative Tools Project

I'm too old to be fan of technology, but I quite like lots of it, and you can't argue that Google have definitely taken the lead on collaboration. At the core of all its products is the idea that what you are working on, you will want to involve other people, as collaborators, as commenters, as mentors or viewers. But Google's model of collaboration is all wrong. Or rather, we've adopted Google tools at the university and although they provide the best tools for collaboration, their model of collaboration is hurting us.  Google's model of collaboration best matches a small business and individual. This is reflected in how Google Drive works.  For example, in Google Drive, if you create a file, only you can delete it. That's great isn't it? Except because a file is yours, when you leave the university, unless your admins move ALL your files to someone else, they're gone.  Before leaving the university, you could individually make someone e...

We wanted to improve the way people at the University request new software and tools. This is a process that requires lots of people's feedback and needs to be very flexible. We need to get software experts to look at it, security teams, the support teams, teaching experts to see if is a good pedagogical match. We need the licensing to looked at and the usability and accessibility. The list is astonishingly long and in these cases it often gets so that your process map just starts to look like infinite spaghetti. No wonder it didn't quite work, infinite spaghetti is always troublesome. Much of my work involves trying to find a workable solution to a fiendish problem.. it's simplicity hunting. And when working with people around the university it's clear that they really don't want a tool that solves their immediate problem, they want abilities that solve problems like these. This is a very different thing. And besides I personally couldn't create So, out of ...

Earlier today we were looking over the results of a survey we'd put out with Google Forms. The answers were well thought out, very long and textual and impossible to read in a spreadsheet. As a group we want to read the responses and share our thoughts about them using the comment feature in Google Documents so I whipped up this script to move the all the data from a spreadsheet to a Google Document. function document_from_spreadsheet() { var ss = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet() var sheet = ss.getActiveSheet() var header_range = sheet.getRange(1,1, 1, sheet.getLastColumn()) var headers = header_range.getValues()[0] var data_range = sheet.getRange(2,1, sheet.getLastRow(), sheet.getLastColumn()) var values = data_range.getValues() var doc = DocumentApp.create(ss.getName() + " Exported") var body = doc.getBody() for (var h in headers){ h = Number(h) var header_name = headers[ h ] var p = body.appendParagraph(header_name) ...

This article looks at creating an application that converts a Google Document to HTML, saves it in a folder on your Google Drive and then shares that folder on the web. This tool is meant for those situations where you have to work in HTML but you'd prefer it if you could use Google's fantastic collaboration features on the content first. What This App Doesn't Do It doesn't try to be too clever. I quite like HTML from back in the 90s when it was simple. Most other systems where you can add HTML don't like you getting too fancy either. It doesn't try to size the images or even get ALL the document elements like Tables of Contents or Page Breaks, it just does the absolute basic needed to copy the source HTML into Blogger or into your CMS and you will need to do more than a little "fixing up" along the way. What is really useful about this app is that all the images are now hosted and so you don't need to go through the painstaking process of...

For a long time I've been saying that Google need to make sure that their left hand knows what the right is doing. There are pockets of innovation in some products that are notably missing from other products. And whilst I don't advocate insisting that each department should consult with each other department before a beautiful carbuncle can be brought into the world, it's nice when you feel that different Google teams are at least on speaking terms. One example ( and there are dozens and dozens ) of innovation insularity is the features that are in a Google Spreadsheet. With a little code and ingenuity you can add menus, and pop ups and whole new interfaces to a spreadsheet, but this can't be done in a Google Document. "Why not?" you might ask. And rightly so. So, I was very pleased when Google announced at Google I/O ( their big developers conference happening right now ) that the features from Spreadsheets were being added to Google Documents. Take a lo...

I have just met with a colleague who is using Google Forms to improve the Ethics Approval process for research projects. They are taking a slightly different path to the one I might have plumped for, and are creating, on-the-fly Google Documents, filling in the appropriate sections and then sending them to people to add comments to etc. We thought he may have worked himself into a corner because although there is a function to capture when people submit a form ( onFormSubmit() ), there isn't one to capture if you "allow the user to edit responses" - there's no onFormUpdate(). We created a workaround by having a time-based trigger that just checks to see if the updated_timestamp is greater than the last_checked_timestamp. The best part, for me, of working with my colleague was when I referred at some point to my JavaScript skills being far from honed and he asked "So is this JavaScript then?" and laughed incredulously. He was happily coding away without...