Blogg-Ed Indetermination

We’ve been using Gmail and Google Apps for several months now in my school, and I must say that I am very pleased with the results so far. We moved from the FirstClass collaborative email suite, a fine but (for us) limited set of tools. We are finding that Gmail, with its ease of connecting to handheld devices, integration with other services, intuitive interface, and constantly evolving tools (I’m a big fan of their labs add-ons), has been a wonderful replacement for FirstClass’ email system. The other Google education products, docs, sites, calendaring, contacts—even Google’s version of tiny-urls—are proving to be a great addition to our school.

But this is not to suggest that there’s no place for Google to improve. After all, most of their products are perpetually beta releases.

Here, in no order other than how they came to me, are ten ideas for making Google Apps and Mail better for education:

1. Most of the time when I am adding contacts, I am adding their work contact information, not home information. I’d like Google enterprise users to be able to default the field to work rather than home.

Don't assume I'm a home user, please!

2. The Google Enterprise help form sucks. Like most organizations, especially those that offer a free service, try to get users to exhaust self-help options before contacting the company. I get that, and I am okay with it. But when I do get to a point where I need to create a trouble ticket with Google, their selection of what problems I am reporting is terribly limited. Those of you who have to do thi know what I mean.

3. Google Apps Status should be offer more granulated information and proactive notification. For example, there have been time when we’re having issue and the status shows green across the board, as this is true for Google overall. But if there are local issue to my site it would be nice if Google could automatically recognize that and report it. Better yet, they should send me a SMS.

4. Google Apps for Education should include Blogger and Picassa. If Google wants schools to use Blogger instead of Wordpress (or Edublogs, sorry guys), then promote it and integrate it with Google Apps, especially Google sites. Ditto for Picassa. Want to beat Flickr, offer schools unlimited storage, great privacy controls, and robust organization skills so that photos can be organized and shared online.

5. Google Widgets. I like adding useful Google Gadgets to sites. It’s a great way to add dynamic content to a site. Yet I have a couple of beefs with how this is currently implemented in Sites. (a) then you type in a search term for the gadget you are looking for, example RSS, you it takes a loooong time for all of the results to load. And then there is little to differentiate between a RSS utility, which allows you to insert your won RSS feeds into a site, or someone who has created their own RSS feed of Hannah Montana news. (shiver). And then, to top things off, the results may include several widgets with exactly the same name and description, with no version number or other information to tell you the differences between them. Lame.

6. Better imap migration support for FirstClass. Okay, so maybe this one is not really in Google’s court. My hunch is that it is a FirstClass problem, but nonetheless, we had a devil of a time migrating email from FirstClass to Google using imap, which is preferred over POP3 since it can migrate mail folders as well as inbox contents. But shame on you, Google, for not having better error messages when the process would fail because an email attachment in FirstClass was greater than 10MB.

7. Integrate of Google Video and YouTube. It’s nice that we get nearly a terrabyte of free storage for Google videos along with our Google Education edition. Google video is proving to be an important adjunct to our coursework, and it’s an easy way to keep content private. But our school also maintains a YouTube channel, and some of the content should be able to live in both places with a simple click of the mouse.

8. Implement change of owner in Google Docs speadsheets. Yeah, yeah, you’re working on it.

9. Controlled vocabulary for Google Sites. Every couple of weeks I go in to the admin interface for Google sites and I am pleased to see so many new sites available. Faculty, staff, and students are creating them right and left. But this organic growth has its limits, especially when it comes to tagging the groups so that others may find them. Let me suggest a couple of things that might help: (a) Le the administrator set up a list of tags, at least one of which must be applied to the site, such as “clubs,” “faculty,” “employees,” or “students;” (b) allow a tag cloud to be created in a master directory of  sites.

10. Smarter management of duplicates in Contacts. Google, the premier search engine, seems clueless when it comes to contact. Oh sure, it can find them, but it’s up to you to suggest which ones are duplicates to be merged. I’d really like Google to perform an audit of my contacts from time to time to identify potential duplicates. And while they’re at it, why not validate the email addresses and URLs I’ve entered, and cross check to see if any of my users have Google Voice numbers?

Hey Google,  keep up the good work. (But make it a wee bit better….)

Oh, and here’s a bonus suggestion. Make my Google Education account work just like my personal account. There’s still some things I can’t log into using my Google ed account. Instead, I’m forced to use my personal account, for things like support forums, Google Voice, and so on. Tks….