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Want the options of letting students claim portions of your office hours or advising slots? Do you run a service on campus that could benefit from having people sign up for appointments within blocks of time you pre-determine? Google Calendar offers the ability to set up appointment slots in the version it provides to institutions like Carleton.

To use Google appointments, select a span of time and then select the option telling Calendar that this span of time will contain appointments. As you set up your appointment slots, Calendar will give you a link to your publishable appointment calendar. When another person clicks on that link and logs in, they’ll see their own Google Calendar with your appointment times overlaid, helping them select an appointment that doesn’t conflict with their other appointments. As people claim appointment slots, those claimed slots will no longer appear as options for subsequent people. As your time is claimed by appointments or other meetings, slots disappear from the available appointments calendar available from that link you sent out. You can even “invite” other people to your appointment slots so that if someone claims an appointment it schedules more than one of you for the meeting.

Check out Google Help, YouTube, or Linda.com for video walk-throughs.

ITS started moving its own departmental folders to a combination of Dropbox and Google Drive late last week, and tomorrow the Library and Archives will begin the same process. As early adopters, these departments will test the transition process and begin the campus-wide conversation about best practices, tips, and tricks.

Since we expect that the various departments on campus will use the various file storage options quite differently to suit their needs, the process of moving from COLLAB to Dropbox and/or Google Drive will involve much more departmentally tailored information sharing than the Zimbra-to-Gmail process had. Much of the information you get will come to you from your department’s File Management Steward, who will work closely with ITS to develop a plan for your department’s transition.

Meanwhile, pre-migration training for the transition to Gmail and Google Calendar is well underway. Here is a list of scheduled training sessions. Faculty and Departmental Assistants will get their Gmail accounts on June 9th, so if you’re in that group come to one of our upcoming training sessions to learn about Gmail and Google Calendar. Even those early adopters who have used Gmail and Google Calendar for years have reported that these training sessions are useful, so come over to CMC110 and join your colleagues in preparing for the move to Gmail!

And finally, we’re gathering a whole year’s worth of “Tips of the Week” for Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Dropbox. Did you know you can set up your calendar so that students can sign up for pre-defined appointment slots? Or that you can filter emails from your aunt to a special space that only appears if there’s a new message to read? Watch this space!

Last week the second group of early adopters moved to Gmail and Google Calendar. There will be a 3rd group of early adopters making the move on May 26th, and after that we’ll begin regular adoption by campus group: June 9th for faculty and departmental assistants, June 23rd for students, and July 7th for all remaining staff.

Between now and July 7th,  the campus will be divided between people who use Zimbra and people who use Google Calendar. During this time, if you are someone who invites people to meetings using calendar event invitations you will notice a couple of oddities. This week’s Tip of the Week addresses these temporary calendaring issues, all of which will resolve on July 7th when the final group of people move to Google Calendar.

Until July 7th, Carleton will be divided between people who use Zimbra and people who use Gmail and Google Calendar. Email will flow seamlessly during this time, but there will be some calendar oddities until everyone has transitioned to Google.

This week’s Tip of the Week: How to manage the two main calendaring artifacts of the campus’ staggered transition process from now until July 7th. In this post:

1. How to search Google Calendars if you’re on Zimbra
2. How to search Zimbra calendars if you’re on Google
3. How to modify calendar events if some people are on Zimbra and some are on Google.

One of the great things about Google Drive is being able to share and work on documents, spreadsheets, and more while someone else works on it at the same time. But when someone shares a file with you, where can you find it again? Here’s what to do.

If you have the file open in your browser, click “File” and then “Organize.” From there, you can select an existing folder in your Google Drive or create a new folder.

If you are looking at the files or folders in the “Shared with Me” section of Google Drive, you can select  one or more of them and then click “Add to my Drive.”

From there you can drag the file or folder into one of your folders, leave it in your main Google Drive folder, or click the 3-dot menu icon and select “move to” to move the file or folder to a logical spot in your organizational scheme.

Either way, you’ll now have the shared file or folder in your own file structure in Google Drive, organized however you prefer.

Bonus Tips:

1. If you rename a file or folder, everyone it’s shared with will see the new name.
2. If multiple people share a folder that has subfolders, and if you move a file from one sub-folder to another in this shared folder, the file location will be changed for everyone else as well.
3. BUT, if you have a shared file or folder, you can put that file or folder into one of your own folders without anyone else knowing. So, for example, if someone shares a project folder with me, I can pull the folder into my own folder called “Projects” or something without affecting anything that the other person can see.
   On the right you can see that I have 2 shared folders and one personal folder all grouped under a personal folder called “ITS.” Nobody in the two shared folders needs to know that I’ve grouped the shared folders under my personal parent folder, but the little person icon helps me understand that everything I change inside of those shared folders will change things for the other participants.

This week, around 20 people have submitted requests to have their usernames lengthened to current standards. If you would like to join these ranks, here’s how to submit your request. The deadline is May 30th!

Thursday evening, our second group of Early Adopters made the move to Gmail and Google Calendar. This second group includes SERC and Summer Academic Programs staff as well as some others. If you’re in this group, we recommend coming to a training session!

Next week, on May 17th at 11am, File Management Stewards for administrative departments can join in training provided by Dropbox. If you are a File Management Steward and would like to join, you can either come to CMC 110 or join the video call from anywhere with an internet connection. Details are here. 

Many Carleton usernames were created at a time when we could only use eight characters, resulting in everyone with last names longer than seven characters losing the last letters off their names. Usernames are no longer restricted to only eight characters, and while there’s no direct connection, changing email systems is a good opportunity to revisit usernames. If you would like to change your username to more closely reflect your last name, please contact the ITS Helpdesk. Click here for details. You can find this information, plus comprehensive training, frequently asked questions, and more on the project website.

Reposted from the Carleton Weekly

The campus currently has many options for where we store data, and limitations on how we can collaborate with each other using our current tools.  As we move toward migrating portions of Collab to Dropbox over this summer and fall, we are having conversations with other departments and groups about how they use Collab, and drafting guidelines for what kinds of data should move to which storage option…