Collaborative Tools Project

In my previous post,  Building a Booking System With Google Apps , I tried to use Google's UI Builder to be a front-end to saving events into a Bookings Calendar for students to book hot desks in the Berrick Saul Treehouse. I wasn't totally happy with the results... still. Lately, I have tried a completely different, simpler approach ( with quite a   few groans about icky Google Docs issues along the way ) which has a sort of  spreadsheet visualisation of the bookings that have been made.  It looks and works like this. Rather than taking apart the code in fragments, the entire spreadsheet is available here . Go take a look, from the File menu choose Make A Copy .  If you create a Calendar and change the Calendar ID in the Script Editor you might be able to get it working for you. There are setup scripts to generate a "calendar-like" spreadsheet. The perches sheet has a list of columns that you might want to alter to suit your needs. The ...

BETTER VERSION HERE In a previous post I shared my initial attempts to create a Booking System with Google Apps . The approach was simple enough... I created a very simple form ( using Google Apps UI Builder ) and I would store peoples' booking information straight into a calendar, with some other bits and bobs being stored in a spreadsheet ( like the list of bookable things ). The end result of my last attempt was passable, but not something I was particularly proud of in any way. So, my next step was to try and make it a bit more robust and maybe try some other approaches. So. I feel the need to get this post out of the way first. It's a massive moan and will only clutter up the post that follows this one. The moans below are either because of Google Apps peculiarities or because of my stupidity. I'm the last person to be able to tell which is which. Google Apps MOAN, MOAN, MOAN Creation of Events in Google Calendar Is A Pain When creating an event in a Goo...

The other day I went for a chat with reluctant blogger   Paul Bushnell in Estates ( pictured right) to find out what they've been doing with Google Apps. The answer is lots, almost too much to fit into one blog post, but I'll have a go. Estates have created a system for working with the numerous fix requests they get, from broken toilets to fire alarm faults to potholes and people stuck in lifts. 1. Data Logging with Android Tablets The team in Estates all have tablets with which they can get access to all the recent reports and log when problems have been dealt with and add any notes. For this they mainly just use simple spreadsheet data entry, rather than Forms or fancy user interfaces. 2. Workflow System  Once a problem has been dealt with, it gets moved from one sheet, onto the next. From here, the job might get logged as "we need to make sure this never happens again" and moved into other sheets.  3. Working With External Suppliers In each o...

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...