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...

Making Your Own Version of Appointment Slots In a previous post I showed an alternative version of Google Calendar's Appointment Slot's functionality created in Apps Script. You can see it in action here . Since making this app Google have, rather fantastically dropped their dropping of the Appointment Slots feature. This app may be useful to anyone wondering how to make an Apps Script Web App that loads jQuery and uses HTML templates. If you want to edit the code that runs it, you can get a copy of the script here: https://script.google.com/d/1Helzgu286Rh9QuHh4dbUq9SloMpb3USwygXSyXP9JcL6erToXpoVK_o5/edit Then you need to go to... File > Make a copy ... and then... File > Manage Versions ... and create a new version of the app. This is needed when you want to publish your web app. So next, then go to ... Publish > Deploy as web app You might want to restrict  Who has access to the the app  setting to just people from y...

Tom Stoneham came to us with an interesting problem... "Can I automatically create 80 or so HomeWork Google Sites from a template for students? And when the deadline has been reached can their access be revoked and links sent out to examiners". The students' task will be create a site about a particular philosopher. The prototype looks like this... I'd had a stab at solving this earlier to see it was possible, and maybe too quickly I jumped for python. But in the spirit of making something that a. worked, b. was sharable, c. I wouldn't have to maintain ( hopefully ), I thought I'd have a go a re-doing it in AppScript. Having met with Tom, there were a few addition requirements: Can student sites have unique IDs that are mapped on to a marking sheet? Can the URLs be kept in a list because, if you have 80 students then 8 markers may be given 10 students each? What is the best way for the University of keep the snapshot but still give the student t...

Given the swingeing criteria in my first post , I decided to start by creating the simplest interface I could.  I began with a simple database of Perches in a spreadsheet and then in the Script Editor created a rough GUI with a couple of dropdown menus, and a couple of buttons that I would fill with data from the a mixture of a Perches calendar and this spreadsheet. I decided not to keep track of bookings in a separate spreadsheet, simply because this felt like it would just be a whole heap of work. I would just use a calendar to store bookings. The guest of each event would decide who's booking it was.  There are two areas of the interface, in the top bit, you can pick a date and book it ( it shows how many perches there are left ). In the bottom bit the dropdown menu is a list of dates you have booked and you can delete them. Like this... The green blob at the bottom is just where I splat debug stuff. The list of perches is kept in spreadshe...