Cause to Pause

Update to yesterday’s post.

I called Google yesterday morning for a status update. “It has been forwarded to a specialist and they are looking into it. Hang tight.”

Later I received a call from fellow ACS user and CITRT member Matt Irvine from FBC Belton who wanted to help. It appears I was unclear in my previous post. We use Google’s multiple domain feature and have two separate domains managed by the same admin panel. Not just a domain alias. Thanks for trying Matt.

Around 4:00 p.m. I called Google again. So far all of my calls seemed to end up in England based on the accent. This one was either Irish or Scottish, but the line was bad so he transferred me to someone stateside. It appeared he was still unsure of what was happening. Fortunately, I was able to send him to my previous post with the video. That changed everything. Less than an hour later I received this email:

Hello Jeff,

I’ve spoken to my colleague Ben and watched the video you posted online.

Our team has identified the issue you reported and are working towards a fix. I’ll update you shortly with some additional information, but I wanted you to know ASAP that we are on it.

Sincerely,

John
Enterprise Support

Fourty-five minutes later I received this email:

Hello Jeff,

To give you some additional context, our team has pinpointed that the issue has been cause by a particular Gmail Lab – Google Calendar gadget. I’d suggest having the affected users try disabling this particular lab within their Google Apps Email account settings. You can also disable Gmail Labs domain wide by changing your Email settings within the Control Panel. Finally, you can also temporarily disable Gmail Labs by appending “?labs=0″ to the URL. To carry this out, your users can login to their secondary domain just as they did in the video that you recorded, and then replace the URL with:

http://mail.google.com/a/yourdomaingoeshere/?labs=0

By logging in with labs disabled, I was able to go into that user’s settings, turn off the Google Calendar Gadget, log out and log back in normally. Those users effected will have to turn off this gadget. Google will update me when it is corrected. Because it is a “Labs” feature, it is “not officially supported”, but I imagine they will get it taken care of quickly.

My takeaways:

• Follow-up. Messages seem to get lost in translation. Even among English speakers.
• Don’t assume that since you aren’t writing a check, you aren’t paying for this service and therefore you have less right to contact support and should wait for them to respond. NO! Inaccessible email is inaccessible email no matter how you slice it. In my mind we are paying dearly for Google’s services by giving them access to the data within our email.
• First thing to try when you can’t log in is to disable labs by appending the login URL with “/?labs=0″
• A picture is worth a thousand words, but a screencast is worth dozens of emails and phone calls. Especially if it is on a URL that is easy to find.

Feel free to contact me via the comment section or email if you have any questions.

We moved our church domain to Gapps in May. Our school domain followed shortly after. With Google announcing their support for “multiple domains” this seemed like perfect the fit. Previously we had two different email providers with varying degrees of satisfaction and Google Apps seemed the logical choice to bring it all into one admin panel, share docs, chat window, etc. There have been a couple of disappointments with the multiple domain feature, but that is for another time.

Well, now we are having our first major issue. By major I mean certain users cannot get to their email. The church is the primary domain: www.pinkpres.org. Our K-8 school is a secondary domain: www.lighthouse-christianschool.org.
What happens when a school teacher tries to login? They get this:

My apologies to Dean Lisenby for the video title.

Did you see how the domain changed on the login area? If not, watch it again.
No idea why this started. No changes have been made to our domains in weeks.

I spoke to someone at Google today. Yes, a real person who created a case. So far I have not heard back.
This will be a good test to see what their turnaround time is for a small operation that is dead in the water. I know many of you have either moved to Gapps or are considering it, before you do, I’d advise checking out the CITRT board. There is a very detailed discussion going on there.

This current issue we have will give us an idea of what churches can expect in the way of support. Stay tuned for updates.

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• Introducing multi-domain support in Google Apps (googleenterprise.blogspot.com)

As a rule, I like things that work and play well with together. It’s no secret we are an ACS shop. A big part of that is the support department, the other is the tie in between their online member offering (AccessACS) and their web CMS (siteExtend). As a CMS, siteExtend is the easiest I have worked with because of the way the back end is laid out. Everything is listed in a series of “cabinets” or “managers”. There’s one for content, one for media, one for channels, etc. The handling of local and global CSS and JS files is the easiest I have worked with so far. It’s a nice piece, but where they really shine is in the linkage with AccessACS. You can read about how we used that to streamline our Elder meetings and reduce paper costs here.

This is all driven from your local database. If you have a group, it doesn’t matter what the group is, you can create a private “channel” on your website that you can then populate with various information. How does it look? It looks like this:

As you can see, it is pretty easy to set up the private channel. Once you create a new small group, activity, class, etc. and do an upload, it will automatically become available within Extend. In this case, anyone who is a member of the Activity Group Leadership>Current Elders and Staff can log into the private channel. Once they are removed from that group, such as an elder rolling off their term, their login will no longer work for that channel. You can go all the way down to the “fourth element” in an activity group, which in this example would have been Leadership>Current Elders and Staff>Hospitality Commission>Fall Festival Committee>Chairperson. Yes, you can get that “granular”. You can also create a channel that is as wide as available to anyone with an AccessACS login. No matter what group they are in – or not in.

When churches talk about integration between our websites and our groups, we generally think “How can I get a list of groups on my site.” which results in some type of iframe or “finder” device. But, if you are going to use your site as more than a “digital brochure”, and there are content pieces that you don’t want to  out and around….or worse yet – PRINT. How are you going to do that? There is some information that your members or regular attenders may want to see, but it really wouldn’t be appropriate for a visitor or someone checking your church out. How would you do that? Could you set up a channel or a whole group of channels tied to logins in less than a minute?

ps. We did set up a wiki site for our budget and controlled the login via Extend.