Surviving the move to Google

The University of Michigan is moving its business productivity systems (mail, calendar, among others) to Google this year.  Some university institutes and colleges have already made the move, and others will make the move later this year.  ICPSR and its parent, the Institute for Social Research, will move in August, although about 70 staff at ISR will make the move early.  These "Google Guides" will help others with the transition.

One concept that might be helpful for the move is to distinguish between an email address and email mailbox.

An email address is basically a pointer.  It can point to another email address, or it can point to an email mailbox.  People publish and share their email address with others, and this is the piece of information we use to target a piece of email.

An email mailbox is a place where email lands.  You log in to an email system (Gmail, Exchange, AOL, and many more) with an ID and password, and once there, you can search for messages, read messages, sort, filter, send, and the rest.

The big change at the U-M this year with email is with everyone's email mailbox.  It's changing from some legacy system at the U-M to Gmail.

Below is a typical example of how things work today at ICPSR.  The @icpsr.umich.edu email address is just a pointer to the U-M enterprise directory entry.  That entry - which ends with @umich.edu - is also just a pointer to another email address ending in @isr.umich.edu.  And that email address is the thing that actually points to the email mailbox, which in our case is the ISR Exchange server.  The first diagram below shows the relationship between email addresses and email mailboxes in the current system for my own email:

Contrast that with the image just above that shows the relationships after the move to Google.  There are two main changes.

The first is that the email mailbox now lives in Google Gmail rather than Exchange, and my email software is a web browser rather than Outlook.  This is a very big change.  Some will find it a pleasant change, and others will hate the new system.

The second is that the roles of the @isr.umich.edu and @umich.edu email address have reversed.  The @isr.umich.edu email address is now just a pointer to another email address, and the @umich.edu email address is the one that "points" directly to Gmail.  And, of course, just like before, one can publish or use any of the three addresses, and the mail goes to the same email mailbox.

Shorter URLs

I've been using TinyURL (www.tinyurl.com) for many years to generated short versions of longer URLs.  One of the things I've liked most about TinyURL is that I can specify part of the URL, which allows me to use something both short and meaningful.

But lately I've switched to Google's URL shortener, http://goo.gl/, instead.  It does not let me customize the URL at all, which I miss a little bit, but since it is tied into my Google ID, it gives me nice features like analytics (e.g., link use counts, demographics, etc), a "home page" listing all of the shortened URLs I have created recently, and very short URLs.

But one word of caution:  the links and analytics are world-readable, so do not use the Google URL trimmer if you have anything you want to keep semi-private.

Seven tips to survive Going Google

Are you Going Google on your campus?

Michigan is going Google in 2012.  A few of us migrated from existing IT systems at the University of Michigan in January, and so have been living the Google dream, but needing to still work with our colleagues who are still using legacy systems for email, documents, calendars, etc.  I've seen some of the complaints people have had as they have moved to Google, and I can also see some of the future problems ahead.  You can save yourself and your colleagues hours of frustration by following a few simple rules.  And so I present the tech@icpsr survival guide to Going Google.

One, stop organizing your email.  You don't need to spend your time that way any longer.  The only reason you  needed to do that in the old world was that you had a low quota for storage (and so kept moving folders off of the mail server and on to local storage) and you have a bad search.  Now you have plenty of storage and a great search.

Two, stop asking people when they are available via email.  Look at the shared calendar.  If you cannot see the person's calendar, tell them to fix the access controls.  And if they won't, then make them schedule the meeting instead.

Three, never, ever download a Google Doc and start editing it in Microsoft Office.  Once you move the document out of Google Docs and into Office you break sharing, introduce odd formatting, make it difficult or impossible to fold the changes back into Google Docs, and commit other crimes against documents.

Four, do not send documents as attachments.  Make a Google Doc.  Share it with your collaborators or readers.  Do not fill up their Gmail allocation with your documents.

Five, use Chat for the quick stuff.  Got a quick question?  Need a real-time response?  Stop using email. Got a long question?  Do not need a real-time response. Use email.  Long chats are just as bad as 4-minute voice mails.

Six, stop doing THAT in email.  If you find yourself encountering barrier after barrier trying to execute a business process via Gmail, it is likely that email is simply the wrong solution.  Need a shared archive of email?  Use a Google Group.  Need a help desk, ticketing, or request system?  Use Footprints or JIRA or any one of many open source or hosted solutions.  Need a place to share and edit a catalog of information?  Use a Google Site.  Many of the Gmail-related headaches I've seen on campus are caused when people are trying to use email as a substitute for a more complex business process.

Seven, get a personnel email address NOW.  My experience is that it is always risky to rely upon an employer or a telecom to supply your email.  People who were using their @umich.edu email address for personnel use and using their @department.umich.edu for work are now in a pinch at UMich.  The @umich.edu address is necessarily becoming the one for work use, and they are now scrambling.  Don't wait, go get a personnel Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail or other email address and mail account today.

Going Google

The University of Michigan is rolling out Google Apps for Education throughout 2012.  A few of us are in the early (1.0) pilot population, and this group made the jump from a variety of legacy University of Michigan email and calendar systems on January 16, 2012.  I first reported on this new initiative late last year, and it's now time for an update.

I should note that I have been using Google's productivity tools outside my professional life for many years, and so there is not much of a learning curve.  I think this will also be true of some of the more broad population at UMich, but will not be true universally.  And I should also note that I had been using a second Gmail account for my professional life too for the past 2-3 years.  The main driver for me was storage space.  While I'm not a huge fan of Outlook and Exchange, the service operated by ICPSR's parent organization - the Institute for Social Research - was always solid.  However, the killer was that the allowable quota for mail was very low (400MB by default), and so I found it frustrating to always be shuffling email off into either the Trash Can or into PST mailboxes.  It was especially rough when it came time to search for something.

And so the move from a consumer Gmail account that I use for work to a Google Apps Gmail account that I use for work has been a small change.  The change from Exchange to Google Calendar for managing meetings has been a bigger change.  On the plus side I'm finding it much easier to manage a single, coherent picture for meeting invitations; I had been trying to manage everything inside of Exchange before.  However, I probably receive 100 meeting invitations for every one I generate myself, and so I haven't had to spend much time and effort ensuring that meetings I create on my Google Calendar are ending up on the ISR Exchange server intact. In fact, most of the headaches I experience with calendaring are related to cases where someone generates an invite within the ISR Exchange server, but does not include anything in the "body" of the invite.  If I try to "read" the invite on a mobile device (e.g., Safari on an iPad), the meeting invite shows up as an empty message.  And so I then track down a "real" computer to see what the meeting invite is all about.

My main take-away so far is that moving from Exchange to Google would best be done (1) quickly, and (2) all at once.  My sense is that we early adopters will continue to face a few headaches like above until the rest of the organization moves to Google in 3-6 months.

Google Music keeps the tunes playing

I started using the new Google Music production service.  I hadn't explored Google's previous offering, the Music Beta, all that much, but decided the time was right to dip a toe into the water.

The service has a lot of similarities to iTunes, of course, except one's library is in the cloud rather than on a PC (assuming one isn't using Apple's iCloud).  Google gives one free space to store 20k songs.  I'm using about 1% of that quota so far.

I like the idea of having a copy of our music in the cloud as an additional backup (or preservation copy), and it is also nice being able to use a standard browser window to manage and play the music.  One complaint I have about iTunes is that because it is conventional desktop software, one has to update it from time to time.  And this is somewhat more burdensome if one has to switch from a "standard" type of login on Windows to one with administrative rights, and then switch back again.

Google provides a tool which will copy music from one's existing storehouse (mine was an iTunes library).  The tool worked well for this purpose, and it did NOT require any administrative rights on my home WinXP (I know, I know) to download, install, and execute.  I started the copy one evening, and some 400 songs had been copied into Google Music by the morning.  One feature request:  It would be fabulous if the Music Manager tool would pull songs directly from a CD.

On the back-end I wonder if Google is using some form of de-duplication to minimize the amount of storage it needs to provision for this service?  It must be the case that there would be great overlap between music collections, particularly with the most popular songs, artists, albums, etc.  Google does such a good job of squeezing storage efficiency out of GMail; would expect them to do the same for their music service.

Hi Ho, a Googling we will go!

The University of Michigan announced (on Halloween! - I hope this is not a trick!) that it will be adopting Google as its collaboration platform.  The roll-out will happen over the course of the next year, and includes tools such as Gmail, Sites, Docs, Calendar, Blogger, and more.

I am delighted.

I've been using Google's Blogger technology (obviously) for some time to publish the Tech@ICPSR blog, and use Google Docs for almost any project where I would have used Microsoft Office in the past.  (I do still use PowerPoint from time-to-time if I need something fancy-schmancy, and don't have the time to conceptualize it as a Prezi instead.)

The biggest win for ICPSR, however, is with Gmail and Calendar.

When I arrived at ICPSR in 2002 we were running our own IMAP-based service with Eudora as the supported client.  And by supported I mean that we installed the free "hey look at these ads" version on each person's machine.  Off-site access was the responsibility of the individual, although we did hook it up to a campus webmail front-end eventually.  We were running MeetingMaker as our supported calendar client.  And by supported I mean that we installed the client on everyone's machine, but no one used it.

Sometime in 2005 or so we realized that it wasn't much fun running email and calendar services, and we also noted that we were already paying for an enterprise mail/calendar system that our parent organization, the Institute for Social Research (ISR), operated on the Exchange platform.  And so we dumped Eudroa and MeetingMaker and started using the Microsoft stack instead.

I was delighted.

However......

I soon experienced the harsh realities of life in the Microsoft stack.  Small mailbox quotas.  Feature-poor webmail experience.  Mailbox "archives" living in one-off files on my PC or file server.  And have you ever tried to find the full email headers in a piece of email stored on an Exchange server?  And like our days of running Eudora and MeetingMaker we continued to be isolated from the rest of campus since our Exchange system was local to ISR and not part of a campus-wide solution.

The honeymoon had ended.

I solved the problem for myself (sort of) by maintaining my "internal to ISR" meetings and email on the ISR Exchange server, but moving my "external" meetings and email to Google.  That is, I changed the U-M address book so that my bryan (at) umich.edu email address was routed to Gmail rather than the Exchange server.  And so when it comes to communicating with the world outside of the ISR, I have a rich email experience that works well in any web browser, superb mail searching, and despite not deleting a single piece of non-spam email in nearly three years, I have used less than 20% of my mail quota.  At this rate, I will need to delete my first email in 2024.  Nice.  Of course, the problem is that I now check email and calendars in two places:  MS Exchange (for my ISR world) and Google (for everything else).

And so I am looking forward to the day in 2012 when it all dovetails back together and there is just one place to check my mailbox and calendar again.