Yesterday I went to Google User Group 2011 meetup in Loughborough. I was just about to start copying my notes in a more coherent form from yesterday, but Chris Sexton beat me to it
Instead, here’s a dump of my notes in a pretty unstructed format. I’ve removed anything that Chris has already covered so you’ll want to read that blog as well.
General
- Google CloudConnect for MS Office to be released next week. Looks very nice. Allows storage of docs in Google Docs complete with versioning etc.
- Google Apps can do OCR on pdfs. I had no idea.
- There was a very nice demo of the translation facilities - live real-time translation in chat and demos of Google Sites being made available in any language via translation. They stressed it was machine translation so not perfect but good enough for people to understand.
- Nice ideas about using templates with Sites to give easy setups for projects etc
- Google also demoed the Chrome laptop. If we went with Apps this would be ideal for use as lending devices. Cheap, no local data, usable by anyone with a Google account. They are aiming for 99.99% uptime next year (including all downtime - any duration, planned + unplanned). No price or release date given.
The OU
- The OU are moving students to Google, but are still working through contractual issues with Google. In contrast, Sheffield ‘just signed it’ and didn’t get any legal look over at all. The OU reported a very low load on their help desk (~120 calls from first 10,000 users moved) almost all about privacy etc not the user experience. 270,000 students in total.
- Thinking about using Apps to store eportfolios via mashups. They mentioned that they found the google groups API not rich enough for their needs. No details were given, but they are working with Google to resolve this. Be good to have a chat with them about exactly what they had issues with.
- Looking at a Google Marketplace app called ( Aprigo Cloudlock ) to allow students to share files with examiners etc in a controlled way. Mentioned it might be a bit too pricy from them however.
- They are also looking at igoogle as a student homepage (the ‘P’ word wasn’t mentioned).
Misc
- bboogle looks interesting. It’s a open source Blackboard building block for Google integration http://projects.oscelot.org/gf/project/bboogle/
