Mister Nifty

Many people don’t see the value of Twitter and the microblog community. I’ve heard people say, “I don’t want to know what others are doing!” Well, that might be true when it comes to casual friendships, but in a work environment, knowing what your co-workers and colleagues are doing can be productive. If you are working on projects or collaborating on ideas, Yammer.com provides one central place for everyone in your organization to communicate.

The beauty of it is that people outside of your organization are not able to join your private network. This keeps communication free from external distractions and allows tracking of important conversations. Another feature I really like about Yammer is the ability to create groups. For instance, during our leadership retreat, I created a group for ideas and the minutes of our meetings. I had several people with laptops join the group and begin documenting the meeting with short posts. All posts were saved in that group and are easy to find when I need them. You can create private groups for more sensitive conversations as well.

You also can use hash tags which help you search for posts later with keywords. For example, one of my posts looked similar to this: “#todo09 Increase the soda machine price to $.75 from $.50.” Yammer then gives you a link to all the hash tags you create and with one click of a button, you have a list of every post where you used that tag. By the way, I haven’t changed the price yet, so come by for a cheap soda.

Last, but not least is the portability of this app.  They have a desktop software that is simple to use as well as the basic web interface.  You can post just like using Twitter or an IM service.  They also have an iPhone and Blackberry app that allows you to submit posts on the go.  Receive SMS updates on your phone or right in your IM client.  This is a free service for companies and organizations. There are a few paid features that you might want to check out. If you need to centralize your team’s communication, sign up for an account and check it out. You have nothing to lose.

Here are a few ideas for using Yammer in churches:

• Creative meetings
• Event planning and coordination
• Weekly staff check-in with posts about what’s going on in their ministry this week
• Corporate to-do lists of things needing completed around the church
• Personal prayer requests group for staff members
• Microblog about missions trips
• Traveling pastors can update staff with minimal effort.

Yammer.com

Everyone and their brother uses Gmail these days because of its pure awesomeness.  I have converted most of my friends and they love it.  The usefulness of a gmail account extends far beyond email to online documents, calendar, rss reader, and custom websites.  Individual accounts are great, but they really don’t meet the needs of an organization.  So, Google packaged these services together to bring churches, business, and organizations Google Apps.

In short, GA uses your domain.  You can map it to a subdomain like:  http://email.yourdomain.com   When you send email from GA, it sends like this:  yourname@yourdomain.com.  It allows you to easily create new email boxes for your team members with just a few clicks on the administration panel.  You can create mailing lists and assign others to help administer the accounts.

With their calendar application, you can create calendars that can only be shared within domain.  This is a great way to keep up-to-date with what your team members are doing throughout the weeks and months.  It also centralizes main team event/schedule data as well.

Google Docs is just pure productivity for your team. You can create docs (text documents, spreadsheets, presentations) online.  The best part is you can share them with team members.  Two team members can be working on the same file and chat about it at the same time.   There is a great setting that does not allow documents to be shared outside of your domain.  So, if you are working on sensitive information, there isn’t a chance of someone without an account getting their hands on it.

Google Sites allows teams to create simple websites that contain embedded documents, lists, presentations, videos, shared calendars, and much more.  Each page of information contains a discussion forum (if enabled) that allows a digital conversation about the subject or event.  This is a great way to plan and post team information for events.  This could easily be created to be your church intranet.

Now, installing Google Apps is a bit of a techie process, but I hope to explain it in simple terms.  First of all you have to have access to your domain from the hosting company where you purchased it.   The most important thing is to have access to the DNS settings.

Once you get to your DNS settings, find where it says CNAME record.  We need to map our sub-domains to send them to the proper Google services.  If you use GoDaddy I’ve included some screenshots of their back-end system.  Don’t worry, Google also provides instructions for most of the major hosts. Add the following CNAME records:

email  (points to)  ghs.google.com
calendar (points to) ghs.google.com
docs (points to) ghs.google.com
sites (points to) ghs.google.com
home (points to) ghs.google.com

Next we need to map our email servers to the Google servers. Find where your MX records are stored.  Write down your current MX records just in case you want to revert to that server one day.  Next delete all your MX records.  GA will only work if you point to their servers.  Add the following MX records.

Priority     Mail Server (You must include the trailing period)
10     ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
20     ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
30     ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
40     ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
50     ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.

Great!  Now you’ve prepared yourself to open a Google Apps account.  The reason you should do this first is sometimes servers take a while to propagate your settings to the internet.  This means you will be sitting, twittling your thumbs and waiting until GA recognizes your settings.

Now, go to http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain/new and enter your domain.  Make sure you click that you are the administrator/owner of this domain.

Once your sign up is complete you will have to verify your domain ownership.

It will give you two options to verify your domain ownership.  The easiest is to add another CNAME record as follows.

It will usually take about 20-30 minutes before your domain is verified.  Just be patient.  In the meantime, customize the URLs of each service to match the sub-domains you entered at your hosting site. (docs, email, calendar, sites, home)

Make sure you active the services, and it will take about an hour before your email is set up on the google servers.  From here, everything is pretty self explanatory.  If you can set this up, you can figure out the rest. While you wait, try adding users and mailing lists.

After all services have activates, your domain is verified, and your DNS settings propagate on your hosting server, you should technically be all set.

To access your GA go to:

http://email.yourdomain.com

http://calendar.yourdomain.com

http://docs.yourdomain.com

http://sites.yourdomain.com

http://home.yourdomain.com

Enjoy this wonderful free service from Google!  If you have any questions, leave a comment and I’ll answer so everyone else can see.