Collaborative Tools Project

I thought I'd share this ongoing project I've been working on about creating workflow support for a team. I've referred to it before in a blog post called  Using Spreadsheets Instead of Forms , in which I argue how using the commenting, "live saving", versioning and collaborative features of spreadsheet far exceeds what can be done with a simple Google Form (see below). This is especially so when the data you are collecting is long and complicated. ( Tip of the hat to Tim Saunders who had this idea ). Having quickly trialled and liked bespoke workflow apps like Kissflow , and also read the documentation for bigger workflow systems like RunMyProcess , we realised that one of our first challenges was to define the mood or tone of this process. It was clear that the process we were trying to support was more consultative and discussion-based than a hard passing of numbers and approvals in a clear process flow. Our process needed to be more about " letti...

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...