Johanna Bates, Technology Manager, Community Partners

[Ed note: This is the second in a series of articles by NTEN Member Johanna Bates, chronicling her organization's switch to Google Apps. Read part 1.]

So, to continue: after we got our free Google Apps account and switched over to Apps Gmail (which is still going swimmingly), we had to ask: How else can Google own us/fix our lives?

The answer: Gcal.

To review, we are six staff, four of whom are part-time. Many of us travel frequently for work and/or work from home on occasion. For years, this has made coordinating our meetings and general communication virtually impossible. When I first started here six years ago, we used a paper calendar on the front desk. Everyone wrote her or his schedule on it. With a pencil. No, really.

When we got our Apps account, we were using AirSet. This calendar is free, and pretty decent. It sends daily agendas, and you can share your calendar with as many people as you want. Mostly, we used it to run an org-wide calendar. If you were going to be out of the office, you'd note it in the AirSet calendar. I kept a very light version of my personal calendar there. I never bothered synching it with my Palm. The Outlook synch wasn't very straightforward for our two Outlook users, so that was another barrier that kept us from loving it.

Then, there we were, using Google Apps' Gmail, with all its nifty bells and whistles. Why not give the oh-so-integrated Gcal a try?

The most basic reason: if we happen to be checking our Gmail, it's just one little click to get to Gcal. Who doesn't like that?

I was able to export AirSet data easily, as a comma-delimited file, and import it into Gcal. For $30, I got CompanionLink, proprietary software that syncs my Palm Desktop to my Gcal. Easy! And affordable, because I'm the only one in our org who needs it.

(Our E.D. syncs his BlackBerry to Outlook, and then exports his Outlook data as a comma-delimited file, deletes private events by hand, and imports it into Gcal -- because he prefers to do it this way. There is proprietary software that would synch Outlook directly to Gcal, but nobody in our org has felt the need to try it yet.)

We have had some consistent problems in Gcal with sharing info among members of our domain. This is frustrating because it is this very domain-sharing feature that is supposed to make Apps different from regular Gcal. For example, our E.D. attempted to set up a domain-wide calendar. Nobody else in our Apps domain was able to access it. Also, there is a setting in Apps Gcal that says, "Share only my free / busy information with my domain." This is supposed to keep the details of your personal calendar entries private showing others only if you are free or busy at a particular time. This doesn't work for us, either. Finally, each person in our org had to share their calendar manually with each of the users in our domain; the "Share calendar with everyone in my domain" feature failed us, too.

Once everyone is sharing calendars, you -- in your own personal Gcal view -- can give each of your co-workers her/his own color. You can also use checkboxes to toggle their calendars on and off in day, week, or month views. This is very helpful when you want to, say, set up a meeting between three of you: you can look at the schedules of the three of you, side-by-side, color-coded.

Also wonderful for setting up meetings is TimeBridge. Gcal synchs with this free, web-based meeting-maker site, and it's pretty stellar. Once all participants confirm a meeting in TimeBridge, you can synch it with Gcal. TimeBridge will add the meeting to your Google calendar.

All of these Gcal features have improved our ability to coordinate org-wide. But none of these cool things requires Apps. All Apps has done for us so far is to make our work-related Gcal screens one click away from our Apps Gmail screens. That's nice, but I do wish that the Apps bells and whistles would work for us in Gcal (and that there was an actual person at Google we could contact when things don't work).

Community Partners works to improve access to health care in Massachusetts for low- and moderate-income residents. Based in Amherst, Massachusetts, CP uses Internet technology to help bring outreach workers together so they can better serve their clients in need. We aim to share what we learn with others in the human services and non-profit sectors so that we can all do a better job of helping people. CP has been involved with NTEN since, well, it's been a long time.