Stop showing up early for meetings! Fix your calendar timezone.

Have you showed up for a meeting an hour early since the time change on March 8? If so, you may have never set the proper timezone in your Google Calendar.

Here's how to do it:

 From the Settings menu (1) select Settings(2).

Ensure that the Country is set to United States (1) and the time zone is set to Central Time (GMT-6:00) (2).

All done. Enjoy your extra hour of sleep.

Getting started with SHC email

Spring Hill College uses Google Apps for Education to provide email and other services to our campus users. If you've never used Gmail, here's a quick screencast to guide you through the login process.

Adding an image to your Gmail signature

Here's a quick video tutorial on how to add a signature image to your SHC Gmail account.

You can copy/paste the logo image URL from here:
http://www.shc.edu/media/common/logo/shclogo.png

Filter Google Calendar Invitation Responses from your Inbox

If you send a lot of calendar invitations, especially for events with a lot of attendees, you may get tired of deleting the emails you get back when someone responds to your meeting invitation.

It's fairly easy to set up a filter in Gmail that will take those response emails out of your inbox, or delete them altogether.

What the heck are Labels in Gmail and why should I care?

"Labels" in Gmail. Gmail users love 'em, Outlook users hate 'em, at least at first.

The great thing about labels is you can use them exactly like folders, but why would you want to? Labels are much more flexible and offer some distinct advantages to the antiquated notion of folders.

Simple Peer Review with Google Docs

I needed a simple peer review process that did not involve the problems associated with passing a document around through email, but was simple enough that it could be used immediately without any additional software or end-user training.

I came up with a simple peer review header that I could embed in a Google Doc. The header contains three things:

1. Some metadata about the usage and purpose of the content
2. A two-sentence user's guide
3. A sign-off area

I drop this header on top of any content for which I would like to gather feedback and approval and then share it with my peer group in read-only mode. Users can use chat to discuss changes between themselves or with me, and suggest improvements with the comment feature. Once the review process is complete, users "sign-off" on the document by commenting by their name on the Approval list. It's dead simple and users have responded well to the process.

Since comments and chat are saved with the document, I have a trail of the whole discussion and approval process. One day when I'm feeling really brave, I'll open the content up for editing by the whole group. Google Docs is pretty good about tracking changes to the document, so this may not be as dangerous as it seems. I'll let you know how it goes.

This is very simple to do yourself, but if you want a jumpstart, copy my sample peer review header here.

How are you using Google Apps in interesting collaborative ways? Let me know in the comments.

Opening email links in Gmail instead of Outlook

It is possible to have your computer open Gmail as the default email handler when you click mailto links on the Web; the SHC Campus Directory, for example. You'll just have to give up Internet Explorer to make it work.

Install Chrome or Firefox and then check out the following posts on the Google Operating System (unofficial) blog. See my previous post about the benefits of using Chrome

For Chrome:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABqjXCCY5pc

Firefox is not quite as simple, but it can be done:
https://sites.google.com/a/brown.edu/google-migration-project-site/how-to/making-gmail-your-default-client/gmail-default-firefox

As always, holler at the Help Desk [helpdesk@shc.edu] if you need additional help.

New Help Site for Google Apps at SHC

New help site for Google Apps

The Office of Information Technology has launched a comprehensive new site with everything you need to know about Google Apps at Spring Hill College.

We hope this new information repository will be helpful as you begin to discover all of the exciting new tools available to you.

For best results, bookmark the following link in your browser:
https://sites.google.com/a/shc.edu/google-apps-help/

Note that you must be logged in to your SHC Google account to access the help site.