IT Lesson

Drive is a great drop zone for incoming files -- no matter if they’re coming from cameras, scanners, faxes, or countless other devices or apps. But throwing files into the root folder makes it difficult for users to find and organize their content. I’ve seen developers create a folder when the user first connects the app with Drive to keep files organized by the app that created it. It’s a simple...

Originally posted on the Google Research blog. Cross posted on the Google Developers blogIn 1945, future Nobel laureate George Stigler wrote an essay in the Journal of Farm Economics titled The Cost of Subsistence about a seemingly simple problem: how could a soldier be fed for as little money as possible?The “Stigler Diet” became a classic problem in the then-new field of linear optimization, which...

Cross-posted from the Google Apps Updates blog.Google Forms is a free and simple way to collect information — from quickly polling your friends about wholl be attending your trip to the haunted hayride, to getting thousands of responses to an awareness survey for work.Over the last few months, Forms has been getting a bunch of updates to help you make good looking surveys, like new theme choices and...

After a recent presentation where I talked briefly about self organizing teams, someone came up to me afterward and said (Im paraphrasing) "That team stuff is great and all, but some people are just lazy and need to be told exactly what to do and when." Argh.But before you judge that person, let me tell you a story. In this true story youll have the opportunity to judge me for having the same thoughts before trying a different approach. This is the story of my self organizing daughter.My...

When it comes to writing UI applications in Apps Script, we get a lot of requests to support event callbacks that are handled in the user’s browser. For example, if your application has a form, you may want to disable a button after it is clicked the first time. Until now, the only way to do that would be by using an event handler on the server to disable that button. Using Client Handlers, your application...

Since we launched the Google Apps Marketplace last month, we’ve been pleased to see a growing number of developers launching products and finding phenomenal success selling integrated apps to Google Apps customers. As more ISVs enter the Marketplace, we want to make sure we see this success continue and accelerate.Next week, we’ll be hosting a webinar detailing best practices for a successful launch in the Marketplace. We’ll cover the most critical tactics for generating installs of your...

Well, didnt take long to google it, but might be useful someday. If you want to remove the top navigation bar in blogger (Next blog,...).Here is the initial tip which didnt work for me. And the final response (comment) there worked for me. Had to place this#navbar {height: 0px;visibility: hidden;display: none;}just bellow the body css selector.UPDATE: You can also just go to the "Template designer" and at "Advanced" => "Add CSS" add this css:#navbar{display:no...

We just released version 1.8 of the .NET Library for Google Data APIs which adds brand new service classes and samples for the following three APIs:Google Apps Audit APIGoogle Content API for ShoppingGoogle Calendar Resource APIThe library also extends the Email Settings API service to implement new functionality to retrieve the existing settings, support new filter actions and manage email delegation.In order to improve security and stability, SSL is now turned on by default for all...

Recently, I was asked to work with a client to help them improve their process. In some of my other readings I found a list of 6 questions used by Alistair Cockburn in his research to search for the most successful properties of software methodologies. We used his questions to interview the team and found the results to be fascinating and useful. The interviewees took on average 3 hours to answer these 6 questions: 1. Please give me a brief history of the project:...

This June I had the priviledge of doing some travelling in Saskatchewan - speaking at both PrairieDevCon and MosoConf. At PrarieDevCon, I was fortunate to have the time to attend a UX session by David Alpert (who will also be presenting at SDEC11 in Winnipeg this fall). I havent spent a lot of time doing UX research, but his presentation opened my eyes to a few things. One of these is the...

One of the big focuses of this blog (and the team behind it) has been providing compelling examples of how integration with Google Apps APIs can make a product richer and more engaging. As a part of this effort, earlier today we announced Au-to-do, a sample application built using Google APIs. Au-to-do is a sample implementation of a ticket tracker, built using a combination of Google App Engine,...

The final day of the conference contained three general sessions.  I found a few people who skipped out on these sessions - too bad for them as the sessions were a great wrap up for the entire week.Dave West talked about Product-Centric Development and the move away from the separation of business and IT (yes please!).  He asked us to start measuring ourselves and our teams by how much value we deliver and not by on-time, on-budget, # of defects, # of stories, lines of code,...

In 2013, we have made a lot of enhancements to our developer ecosystem. From the Admin SDK to the Google+ API for Domains, weve provided developers with better tools to build applications that integrate with, and add functionality to, Google Apps.We are starting to roll out some significant changes that will make it easier for developers to build, deploy, and market applications for domain installation....

Three months ago, we launched Google Drive along with the Google Drive SDK. The SDK allows applications to manage files that users have uploaded to Drive and to integrate deeply in the Google Drive UI. Today, we’ve just extended the SDK to allow developers to interact with native Google Docs types such as Google Spreadsheets, Presentations, Documents, and Drawings. We now provide an easy way to export...

Here’s the scenario: you create a form, you have a script that triggers onFormSubmit and all is well... until it gets popular. Occasionally you start having interlacing modifications from separate invocations of your script to the spreadsheet. Clearly, this kind of interlacing is not what you intended for the script to do. Up until now, there was no good solution to this problem -- except to remain...

Recently Ive been pondering collective vs. individual ownership and commitment, the theories behind it, and how to respond to someone who many not have considered why collective ownership and commitment is important. If you are involved on a team that is assigning responsibility to individuals, you could respond in several ways. My own impulse may be to respond either with frustration or to smile, nod and wink to my more agile-aligned team members. However, I have never...

Users of cloud-based business applications shouldn’t have to create, remember and maintain new credentials for each of the many apps that they use. With applications on the Google Apps Marketplace, they don’t need to-- these applications allow users to login with their existing Google Apps accounts using OpenID.We chose to power our Single Sign On (SSO) using OpenID because it’s the predominant open...

Every day, millions of businesses, schools and government agencies rely on Google Apps to get their work done. And each of these organizations has an administrator (or a team of admins) responsible for tasks like creating new accounts, managing mobile devices, and specifying exactly which products and features their employees can use.Today, were announcing the Admin SDK, which enables developers to...

The most challenging part of learning anything new is often simply getting started. Unfortunately, when it comes to programming, the first few minutes (or more!) are often occupied with cumbersome details such as setting up an environment, which results in very little time spent actually writing code. We were certain there must be a better way.Code School has been doing exciting things with learning...

Google Apps domain administrators have access to a number of APIs to automate their management activities or to integrate with third-party applications, including the Provisioning API to manage user accounts and groups, the Admin Audit API, Admin Settings API, and the Reporting API. These APIs were only available in Google Apps for Business, Education and ISP editions but many administrators of the...

Editors Note: This article is written by Steve Webster and Vinay Thakker who work at Dito. Dito has developed applications such as Dito Directory which is available in the Google Apps Marketplace.You just created your own contact group in Google Apps Contact Manager and now you want to share this contact group with a few other coworkers (not the entire company). Over the last couple of years, our...