One of our fundamental shifts this year has been the implementation of Google Apps for Education. This is truly a seismic change in thinking and work. Google Apps can make us more efficient and effective. However, it also means that things need to be done a little bit differently. Trying to do things just like they’ve always been done doesn’t make things more efficient. Rather, that can lead to frustration.

Let’s take a quick look at what happened last month as example. Last month, we received 4,559,431 emails. One month – over 4.5 million emails. An additional 522,685 emails were SPAM and moved automatically to the SPAM mail folder. We sent over 125,000 emails.

One of the very powerful pieces of Google Apps is the ability to share documents. However, not all documents need to be shared. By far, most of our documents are not shared (this is expected and appropriate). We had over 25,000 documents created last month. We had an almost 10,000 spreadsheets created.  We have over 179,000 documents that are private to the owner – not shared. We have roughly  7,000 documents that are shared within or outside the school district.

This has been a terrific year. As we continue to grow and learn, we’ll be able to leverage some of these possibilities.

New Google Sign in page:

The new sign-in page began rolling out to select Google domains in January 2014.

The new sign-in page provides a streamlined and cohesive sign-in experience for all users, an account chooser that makes it easy to switch between Google accounts, and security enhancements, including advanced bot detection and improved account hijacking protection.

We are well underway with the Google Apps for Education transition. Lots of teachers, staff members and administrators are loving it. Some are still early on in the journey to utilizing Google Apps for Education. So, why are some farther along than others? Well, simply put, it is a journey. Google Apps is a different way of thinking. It is the digital way. This can be a bit disconcerting for some. After all, the way that they are used to working worked right?

Google Apps is really about a mind shift. It can be much more efficient and effective. However, it does require thinking just a little bit differently.

Working digitally provides us with an opportunity to do things more productively. In the past, we would send out calendars and have hundreds of people all typing in the same information on different calendars. Invariably, someone would make a mistake. This would take a great amount for each person. If there were any changes to the calendar, the calendar would have to be sent out again. Then hundreds of people would need to completely review their entire calendar to see what had changed. This could occur through several iterations.  Now we simply create a calendar and let people subscribe to the calendar. If anything needs to be adjusted, it is corrected in one place and hundreds of people have a calendar that is correct and up to date. This saves massive  amounts of time and decreases communication errors.

Sharing documents is another example. The old way of doing things is to send out and email with an attachment. If feedback is needed or if any corrections need to be made, that means more emails with attachments. The receiver of the emails is now charged with keeping track of which email is the “correct” one. This can lead to lots of wasted time and communication errors as well. This also ends up meaning that people spend lots of time looking at documents and emails that they’ve already looked at. Instead, a shared document can streamline that whole process. Instead of receiving several emails, the individual can view the most current version of the document. The author of the document has complete control over who can see, comment or edit the document. This provides for great flexibility.

This just touches on the possibilities. Sure, in some ways the “old ways” “worked”, but they took a lot of time and are no longer really efficient. People work differently now. It’s time that we reflect the new possibilities.

Well, we continue to make progress. Calendar and Contact syncing is just about complete. Email syncing is getting very, very close.

status: RUNNING/Migrating (100%, 100%, 88%)    (300 users)
status: RUNNING/Migrating (99%, 100%, 88%)      (300 users)
status: RUNNING/Migrating (101%, 100%, 93%)    (300 users)
status: RUNNING/Migrating (100%, 100%, 92%)    (300 users)
status: RUNNING/Migrating (100%, 99%, 96%)      (300 users)

We continue to make progress on our Google Apps sync. This means that the majority of users will have their information in Google Apps. Almost all of the contacts and calendars have synced, and we are making great strides in email.

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• status: RUNNING/Migrating (100%, 100%, 80%)      (300 users)
• status: RUNNING/Migrating (99%, 100%, 81%)        (300 users)
• status:    RUNNING/Migrating (101%, 100%, 87%)   (300 users)
• status: RUNNING/Migrating (99%, 92%, 83%)         (300 users)
• status:    RUNNING/Migrating (100%, 99%, 94%)    (300 users)

(contacts%,CAL%,Email%)

We are making progress in the syncing of information from Exchange to Google Apps for Education. Here is where we currently stand:

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1.  status: RUNNING/Migrating (95%, 95%, 71%)      (300 users)
2. status: RUNNING/Migrating (91%, 99%, 72%)       (300 users)
3. status: RUNNING/Migrating (99%, 100%, 98%)      (300 users)
4. status:    RUNNING/Migrating (98%, 98%, 78%)     (300 users)
5.  status: RUNNING/Migrating (87%, 67%, 69%)      (300 users)
6. status: RUNNING/Migrating (83%, 98%, 79%)       (300 users)
7. status:    RUNNING/Migrating (100%, 99%, 90%) (300 users)

*Note that the parentheses indicate the percentage of  (contacts%,CAL%,Email%) that are synced. That is (95%, 95%, 71%) would indicate that 95% of the contacts, 95% of the Calendar items, and 71% of the total email of those users have been synced to Google Apps.

As you can note, this is a big improvement over our previous numbers.