Google Docs as an easy document library

Regular readers will know how much I love Google’s online tools. I recently blogged about how Google Docs can be used to create open data formats and today I’ve taken this further by using Google Docs recently released Share Folders to prototype an easy document library. As usual I’ve used some public documents from City of Lincoln Council and you can find the results here.

What’s basically going on here is that I’ve created a root folder within Google Docs which I have set to be shared globally. Any folders and documents within this then automatically inherit this share permission, allowing them to be accessed by anyone. Simple. What it basically does is enable an organisation, be it a local authority, some business or anyone, to store all their public documentation online and logically categorise it for easy consumption. Combined with the fact that it’s all being delivered through Google Docs via embeds and therefore does not really require download by the end user then this becomes a brilliant way to distribute documents. It’s also very easy to keep updated and any changes made to native Google docs are reflected in real time.

There are, however a few niggling problems with this. The shared  folders do not have a search on them which would be fantastic, especially if they were to be used to store lots of documents. Also, there is no easy way to download the native Google documents in their “whizzy” open data formats (RTF, RSS etc) without “opening” them, despite the fact that they’re already open. This system will also be somewhat detached from an organisations main website, i.e. not easy to link in using traditional CMS commands (for basic CMS publishers) or included in search results. It would also be top if the shared folder generated its own RSS feed.

But, all in all, I think that this is a very good application of Google Docs, once again. The more Google adds to these cloud based services, the more we can look at using them creatively.

I’ve also started using this for myself – look down the right navbar and you’ll see a link to my public Google Docs. Anything I want to make public will go in here so check back often for new additions. Again, would be good if I could RSS it but – hey ho

Using Google Docs to free your data

Councillor Allowances, published to the City of Lincoln Council Website via Google Docs

I’m very pleased to announce that a project long in gestation has been released to the public today; the first heavy integration of Google Docs into the City of Lincoln Council website. I’d previously dabbled with this to publish usage metrics on our website here, but the page we launched this morning displays details of councillor allowances; more mainstream, public data.

The process is simple – copy and paste your XLS spreadsheet into a Google Spreadsheet, hit the big blue “Share” button and select “Publish as a Web Page”. Select the sheets you wish to publish (if you have many), tick “Automatic Publishing” and then select the flavour you want. First off I used the “HTML to embed in a page” option – this gave me the iFrame that allows the user to read the document in the page without downloading a PDF or navigating away from our site. I then grabbed links for CSV and RSS flavours to encourage reuse and resyndication, and finally provided links to a PDF version and standalone web version to allow the user choice.

But why is this better? Here’s some of the benefits of this approach:

• We don’t force the user to download a document to read it – the information is presented to them right there on the page.
• Google will automatically convert the document to reusable flavours – we can publish these and encourge reuse.
• It’s easier to maintain – instead of having to upload a new version of the document, change links on the site, remove the old document etc, etc, all we need do is update the remote file on Google Docs.

There are a few cons, however:

• There has to be some consideration on how this is managed – as an organisation we do hold sensitive data which could easily be leaked through something like Google Docs so…
• …Google Docs is banned across most of our network (not boasting, but as web guy I get special access). This makes it a problem for officers to get on board and help republish this data.
• There could be accessibility issues – I need to do some testing in this area but I’m not ruling it out as yet.

On a whole, though, this integration should work to make data more accessible and make it easier for users to read documents on our website that they would have had to download in the past. I’m hoping that we can move to integrate this across the website and will be keeping this blog up-to-date as this moves ahead…

Lincoln Christmas Market and Screengrab!

Two topics in this post, one which I should have blogged about a month ago but somehow totally forgot to!

Lincoln Christmas Market Website

I’m particularly pleased with the Lincoln Christmas Market website. Launched mid July 2009, it’s self hosted on a WordPress MU install. The idea behind it is to provide a platform to easily release information about the market as it becomes available, be very customisable for the City Council and also promote discussion and involvement. There are plans to use it to liveblog the actual market, posting pictures and video as they are taken. Hopefully I’ll post up about this when it happens as I should be involved!

I’d also like to point out that the pic in this post was taken using the Screengrab! plugin for FireFox. This is a doody little plugin that, with a single click, can take a grab of the current view of any web page, the whole page or a selected portion of the page. This saves you having to trim any unwanted junk out or stitch together a screenshot in Photoshop. Very cool and a real timesaver!

Community Voice Redux

Just a quickie to say that I relaunched Community Voice on the City of Lincoln Council website today. It has been properly branded with our standard website theme to blend seamlessly in and is now hosted on a WordPress MU install. I’m hoping to write up a little bit on our use of WordPress MU as a rapid deployment platform for satellite sites but, in the meantime, Community Voice v2 can be found at http://community-voice.lincoln.gov.uk.

Lincoln Bin Calendar Search

It’s been a little while since I last posted, primarily because I’ve been beavering away on a number of projects for the City of Lincoln Council. Just launched today is our long awaited bin calendar search engine. I don’t claim full ownership of this project as two of my colleagues have been working hard for quite some time to standardise the way this information is stored so that we can form a search round it.

We were investigating a number of solutions from integration into MyLincolnshire to a bespoke search form. In the end I stepped in and developed a front end using our Achieve Forms package. This is an important project, not only because it has been so long in the running and is a benefit to the users of our website, but also because it is a great proof of concept for using Achieve Forms to perform database searches. I’m hoping off the back of this that we can use the theory to expose more public data this way, developing some decent online solutions for the end user.

As a small aside, I’d also like to apologise to the people who’s comments were sitting in my pending queue; I had thought that I’d set comments to automatically approve, however aparently this was not the case! All should be well going forwards, however…