Infokus

Apps Script developers have consistently expressed the need to monitor the health of various Apps Script services. Additionally, at every forum, event, hackathon or hangout, we have heard you express a need to know and understand the quota limits in Apps Script.

Apps Script Dashboard is born!

We heard your message loud and clear, so we started working on a dashboard for Apps Script. Today, we are launching the Google Apps Script Dashboard. This experimental dashboard can be used to monitor the health of 10 major services. It also provides a detailed view into the quota restrictions in Apps Script.

Features of the Apps Script Dashboard

1. The dashboard offers a view into past and present states of 10 major Apps Script services. The past view goes back one week.
2. Each Apps Script service has three states on the dashboard: Normal Service, Known Issues and Investigating.
3. The Known Issues state signals that we know about the issues in that service and are working to fix them.
4. Quotas are displayed for three different types of user accounts: Consumer accounts (for example @gmail.com accounts), Google Apps (free) accounts, and Google Apps for Business, EDU and Government accounts.

Interesting Facts About Quotas

Did you know that consumer accounts (for example @gmail.com accounts) have quota of 1 hour of CPU time per day for executing triggers? Imagine the extent of automation that can happen for each user with triggers. And how about 20,000 calls to any external APIs. Now that packs in a lot of 3rd party integration with the likes of Salesforce.com, Flickr, Twitter and other APIs. So, if you are thinking of building extensions in Google Apps for your product, then don’t forget to leverage the UrlFetch Service which has OAuth built-in. Event managers can create 5,000 calendar events per day and SQL aficionados get 10,000 JDBC calls a day.

Check out the Dashboard for more.

Saurabh Gupta profile | twitter | blog Saurabh is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google. He works closely with Google Apps Script developers to help them extend Google Apps. Over the last 10 years, he has worked in the financial services industry in different roles. His current mission is to bring automation and collaboration to Google Apps users.

Note from editor: The syntax for this feature has changed since this was first posted. The posted has been edited to reflect the change.

Try to think back to when the word “viral” had only negative connotations . . . if you are a web developer trying to market your app on a minimal budget, you may not remember those dark days at all! Viral marketing is currently not just the cheapest but arguably the most effective way to spread the word about your app and to drive user adoption. Through file sharing and MIME type-filtered upsells, Google Drive integration gives apps some powerful “viral” marketing capabilities.

Users love to share files. Google Drive makes this easy for them to do, and we know from experience that they do it often. When users share or sync files that they can’t open using an installed viewer, Drive displays a link to a Chrome Web Store list of apps that can open that file type -- potentially, your app. This can be a powerful mechanism for distributing your app to the users that actually need it.

For example, let’s say someone asks me to review a project plan saved in an .mpp file. I currently don’t have a viewer to open such a file. Am I out of luck? No — help is right there for me at the bottom left of the screen:

If I click on this link, I’m redirected to a Chrome Web Store list of installable apps that have registered themselves to open .mpp files. Currently, this includes some excellent options for Drive-integrated project management web apps:

Interested in getting your app in a list like this? It’s not difficult. First, add a special web intent to your Chrome Web Store manifest. This intent should include the MIME types and extensions youd like your app to be searchable by. Though the type field accepts only MIME types, it allows you to model file extensions as the special type application/vnd.google.drive.ext-type.<EXTENSION>.

 
{
  "name" : "ProjectManagmentApp",
  "version" : "1",
  "description" : "A web app to manage projects",
  "container" : "GOOGLE_DRIVE",
  "api_console_project_id" : "1234567891011",
  "gdrive_mime_types": {
    "http://drive.google.com/intents/opendrivedoc": [
      {
        "type": ["application/vnd.ms-project", 
                 "application/vnd.google.drive.ext-type.mpp"],
        "href": "http://projectapp_web_url/",
        "title" : "Open",
        "disposition" : "window"
      }
    ]
  },
  ...
 

Once an intent like this is published in your app listing, you’ll be featured in Chrome Web Store “upsell” lists like the one depicted above, and users viewing the list will be a click away from installing your app. For full detail on adding this web intent to your manifest and testing it for your Chrome Web Store listing, see Help Users Find your App in the Drive SDK documentation.

We recommend that any and all listed apps should list their MIME types for filtering in this way. However, doing so is especially beneficial for apps that can open any of these following types, for which there is currently no registered viewer at all:

• message/rfc822 -- Email
• text/x-vcard -- Electronic business cards
• application/x-font-ttf -- Fonts
• image/gif -- Animated GIFs

Inevitably, users who lack valid viewers will end up with shared files of these MIME types. And just when they are about to throw up their hands, they’ll find your app at the top of the list of apps that can help them open the file. This creates the conditions for a very positive first user experience for your app.

If you have questions or comments about how to add this feature to your app, don’t hesitate to let us know on our Stack Overflow tag, google-drive-sdk.

Eric Gilmore Eric is a technical writer working with the Developer Relations group. Previously dedicated to Google Apps APIs, he is now busy writing about all aspects of the Google Drive SDK.

Google Apps domain administrators can use the Email Audit API to download mailbox accounts for audit purposes in accordance with the Customer Agreement. To improve the security of the data retrieved, the service creates a PGP-encrypted copy of the mailbox which can only be decrypted by providing the corresponding RSA key.

When decrypted, the exported mailbox will be in mbox format, a standard file format used to represent collections of email messages. The mbox format is supported by many email clients, including Mozilla Thunderbird and Eudora.

If you don’t want to install a specific email client to check the content of exported mailboxes, or if you are interested in automating this process and integrating it with your business logic, you can also programmatically access mbox files.

You could fairly easily write a parser for the simple, text-based mbox format. However, some programming languages have native mbox support or libraries which provide a higher-level interface. For example, Python has a module called mailbox that exposes such functionality, and parsing a mailbox with it only takes a few lines of code:

import mailbox

def print_payload(message):
  # if the message is multipart, its payload is a list of messages
  if message.is_multipart():
    for part in message.get_payload(): 
      print_payload(part)
  else:
    print message.get_payload(decode=True)
    
mbox = mailbox.mbox(export.mbox)
for message in mbox:
  print message[subject]
  print_payload(message)

Let me know your favorite way to parse mbox-formatted files by commenting on Google+.

For any questions related to the Email Audit API, please get in touch with us on the Google Apps Domain Info and Management APIs forum.

Claudio Cherubino   profile | twitter | blog Claudio is a Developer Programs Engineer working on Google Apps APIs and the Google Apps Marketplace. Prior to Google, he worked as software developer, technology evangelist, community manager, consultant, technical translator and has contributed to many open-source projects, including MySQL, PHP, Wordpress, Songbird and Project Voldemort.

We recently updated the Google Apps Marketplace with several new features to help developers better engage with their customers and improve discoverability of apps in the marketplace.

Reply to Comments & Reviews

It’s no secret that engaging your customers and responding to their feedback is critical to success. It’s now possible to engage in conversations with customers based on comments & reviews for your app in the marketplace.

Rich Application Snippets in Google Search

Google Search recently introduced rich snippets for applications several months ago with enhanced search results for applications from marketplaces like Android Market and others. Marketplace apps will soon be appearing as rich snippets with ratings and pricing details.

New Category Home Pages

Lastly, we introduced new home pages for each category in the Marketplace to feature the top installed and newest apps for that category.

We hope that you find value in these changes and wish everyone a happy new year!

Steven Bazyl   profile | twitter | events Steve is a Developer Advocate for Google Apps and the Google Apps Marketplace. He enjoys helping developers find ways to integrate their apps and bring added value to users.

"The assumption of failure is built into the agile process. The traditional method is built on the presupposition that we can plan failure out of the process. We dont have to test for it because weve taken everything into account. Agile assumes that humans are going to fail. By its very nature, agile cant ignore (or censure) failure. If the accusation is that agile suppresses failures, then by definition - that is not agile. If agile is done properly then it cant* fail because it tests for failure all along. If you suppress failure, you guarantee it. Agile has a different perspective on failure. It doesnt see failures as catastrophic, but as expected. That difference in perspective allows us to celebrate failure rather than suppress it."

1. The initial setup

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<ApplicationManifest xmlns="http://schemas.google.com/ApplicationManifest/2009">
 
<Name>[ApplicationName]</Name>
<Description>[Description]</Description>
 
<!-- Administrators and users will be sent to this URL for application support -->
<Support>
<!-- URL for application setup as an optional redirect during the install -->
<Link rel="setup" href="[ApplicationSetupUrl]?domain=${DOMAIN_NAME}" />
 
<!-- URL for application configuration, accessed from the app settings page in the control panel -->
<Link rel="manage" href="[ApplicationAdminUrl]?domain=${DOMAIN_NAME}" />
 
<!-- URL explaining how customers get support. -->
<Link rel="support" href="[ApplicationHelpUrl]" />
 
<!-- URL that is displayed to admins during the deletion process, to specify policies such as data retention, how to claim accounts, etc. -->
<Link rel="deletion-policy" href="[ApplicationPolicyUrl]" />
</Support>
 
<!-- Show this link in Googles universal navigation for all users -->
<Extension id="navLink" type="link">
  <Name>[ApplicationName]</Name>
  <Url>[ApplicationLoginUrl]?domain=${DOMAIN_NAME}</Url>
  <!-- Used APIs -->
  <Scope ref="contactFeed"/>
  <Scope ref="spreadsheetFeed"/>
  <Scope ref="doclistFeed"/>
</Extension>
 
<!-- Declare our OpenID realm so our app is white listed -->
<Extension id="realm" type="openIdRealm">
  <Url>[ApplicationRealm]</Url>
</Extension>
 
<Scope id="doclistFeed">
  <Url>https://docs.google.com/feeds/</Url>
  <Reason>[Reason]</Reason>
</Scope>
 
<Scope id="contactFeed">
  <Url>https://www.google.com/m8/feeds/</Url>
  <Reason>[Reason]</Reason>
</Scope>
 
</ApplicationManifest>

2. Rails libraries and OpenID

• OAuth Gem
• Ruby-openid
• Rack-openid
• Ruby-openid-apps-discovery

def login
 
# The domain needs to be set. For example with params[:domain]
authenticate_with_open_id(params[:domain]),
   { :required   => ["http://axschema.org/contact/email"], :return_to  => /login}) do |result, identity_url, registration|
 
     if result.successful?
       # Succesfully logged in, retrieve email address
       email = get_email(registration)
     else
        # Failed to login
     end
end
 
end
 
def get_email(registration)

       ax_response = OpenID::AX::FetchResponse.from_success_response(
       request.env[Rack::OpenID::RESPONSE])
       ax_response.data["http://axschema.org/contact/email"].first
 
end

3. Using the Google Data APIs

CONSUMER_KEY = "Your-consumer-key"
CONSUMER_SECRET = "Your-consumer-secret"
 
def get_contacts
   
   # Retrieve contacts 
   email = "user@email.com"
   url = "https://www.google.com/m8/feeds/contacts/default/full?xoauth_requestor_id=#{email}"
   contacts = gdata_request(url, :get)

end
 
def gdata_request(url, method, headers = {}, data = "")

    uri = URI.parse(url)
   
   # Setting up two-legged-oauth
   consumer = OAuth::Consumer.new(CONSUMER_KEY, CONSUMER_SECRET)
   oauth_params = {:consumer => consumer, :method => method, :request_uri => uri.to_s}
 
   # Set Net:HTTP connection
   http = Net::HTTP.new(uri.host, uri.port)
   http.use_ssl = (uri.port == 443)
 
   if method == :post
 req = Net::HTTP::Post.new(uri.request_uri)
 req.body = data
   else
 req = Net::HTTP::Get.new(uri.request_uri)
   end
 
   # Set authorization header
   oauth_helper = OAuth::Client::Helper.new(req, oauth_params)
   req.initialize_http_header(headers.merge({Authorization => oauth_helper.header}))
 
   # Execute request
   response = http.request(req)
   response.body
 
end

def submit_csv_to_gdocs
 
  email = user@email.com
  url = https://docs.google.com/feeds/default/private/full?xoauth_requestor_id=#{email}
 
  # Create new CSV
  csv = StringIO.new
 
  CSV::Writer.generate(csv, ,) do |line|
  line << ["Example 1", "Example 2"]
  end
 
  csv.rewind
  
  # Send request
   gdata_request(url, :post, 
      { Content-Type => text/csv, 
         Slug => test.csv, 
         GData-Version => 3.0 }, 
      csv.read)

end

1. Set the signature method to HMAC-SHA1
2. Type in your consumer key and consumer secret (these can be found in your Vendor Profile)
3. Set your Feed URL (step 6)
4. Set GData-version to 3.0 unless the API only supports 2.0
5. Click execute

Want to weigh in on this topic? Discuss on Buzz

Editor’s Note: Guest author Andrew Stillman is a teacher who works at New Visions for Public Schools, a non-profit that provides direct support services to 76 New York City high schools. — Arun Nagarajan

On March 16th, as a green tide tide of college students flowed into Manhattan for a day of rousing revelry, more than 50 young coders from New York-area computer science programs and 30 teachers were drawn instead to Kean University in New Jersey by the gravity of St. Hacktrick’s Day, our first Apps Script for EDU Codeathon. Inspired by the viral popularity of the Flubaroo, Doctopus, and autoCrat scripts for teachers, St. Hacktrick’s Day aimed to pair coders with educators to produce more free, smart tools for education.

Most of the student scripters were on their first day of spring break, making our huge turnout for this event all the more remarkable. Product designers — all working educators who took time out on a Saturday — traveled from as far north as Ulster County, NY and as far south as Virginia, while we had others who joined teams via G+ Hangouts from Singapore, Montreal, Vancouver, and London.

Unlike a typical hackathon, teams weren’t simply building their own ideas — instead, to ensure their scripts would be truly useful in the classroom, we solicited project proposals through a Google Moderator board. By the day of the event, we had 48 ideas with 187 votes from educators around the world.

In all, 17 teams built demo-ready prototypes in less than 6 hours of coding. The Apps Script team rounded up a few Nexus 7 tablets for the winners below and invited them to present their projects to the Google Docs engineering team:

Popular vote: Picture Prompt Generator
Summary: Inserts kid-friendly pictures from Google Image Search into student documents. Elementary students then write stories based on the visual prompts.
Design: Daniel Scibienski
Code: Ashish Nandwani and Krutika Shah

Judges choice: Plagiarism Detector
Summary: Uses a similarity algorithm to rank Google Documents by originality.
Design and code: Alice Lin, Basim Baig, and Jackie Wei (Stony Brook University)

Judges choice: Unpivot Google Form Data
Summary: Removes duplicates from Google Form data and transforms it for use in a pivot table.
Design: Ron Turchyniak
Code: Andrew Ireland, Sangwook Lee, and Steve Byung Park (Stony Brook University)

Teams have been asked to open-source their code and donate it to New Visions for Public Schools, the support organization I work for, and to consider improving their projects for use by educators everywhere. We’ll keep you posted as these resources become available.

Big thanks to our participants, to organizers Meredith Martin, Dave Zirkle, Daniel Scibienski, Emily Graves, Diana Potts, Lisa Thumann, Andrew Carle, and to Google’s Arun Nagarajan, Saurabh Gupta, and Zach Yeskel.

Andrew Stillman   profile Andrew Stillman is a career STEM educator who works as Program Officer for Digital Instruction at New Visions for Public Schools, a non-profit that provides direct support services to 76 New York City high schools. Andrew founded YouPD.org and has written a number of popular Apps Scripts for schools designed to improve efficacy through better workflows, communications, and data management in Google Apps.

1. Gather team members for the exercise. Not everyone needs to participate, but you should have willing participants from each role including developers and client.
2. Decide on a focus for your UX design. This could be a specific release, user scenario, or some grouping of user stories.
3. Hand out 8up papers and pencils to everyone on the team.
4. Ask everyone to create 6-8 sketches of the different pages/screens in the app (see tips below).
5. Once you start, tell them they only have 5 minutes to complete their 6-8 sketches.
   • You could tell them this before, but it seems to help crystalize their thoughts when they hear this.
6. After 5 minutes, review each set of drawings:
   • Each person has 3 minutes to pitch their drawings to the team.
   • The team then has 2 minutes to identify 3 things that worked and 2 things to change.
7. Repeat steps 3-6 until the team reaches a consensus on the design.
8. Once your design is complete, keep the final sheets as your UI reference model.
   • You wont likely need to transfer this to Visio or any other tool. The model should contain enough information and brief notes so that you can develop straight from the paper and make final adjustments in your development tool while having a conversation.

• Gloss over details in your drawings. You need just enough detail to communicate your design.
• Aim for quantity not quality.
• When doing this for the first time, dont tell your team they only have five minutes until after they start.
• Do steal ideas from each other.
• As always, include your client in these sessions.

"In this course Im going to teach you what I know to the best of my ability. Im going to tell you truths as I understand them today. But, someday you will encounter ideas and truths that might make more sense than what I have taught you in this course. You will discover that some of what I have taught you is wrong. When you encounter those ideas, embrace them. And even as you embrace those new truths, remember that you, also, might be wrong again."

Editor’s Note: Guest author Romain Vialard works at Revevol, an international service provider dedicated to Google Apps and other Cloud solutions. -- Jan Kleinert

In a previous post, Improving Revevol’s Productivity with Google Apps Script, we demonstrated how Apps Script helped us handle a lot of training requests. For any given client, using tools we built with Google Apps Script, we are able to quickly find the perfect trainer depending on variables like the date, the place, the language and the training scope. To ensure that the training we do meets a consistent quality bar, we send a survey to all the participants at the end of the training. This post discusses how we use Google Apps to conduct these surveys to glean insight into the quality of our training.

We started our survey project by using simple Google Forms to poll our users. Each form creates a spreadsheet per language, each with thousands of submissions. From this data, we need to create visualizations to quickly make sense of all the information we gather. We want our international clients to each be presented with a unique dashboard for trainings in all their subsidiaries, our change managers to be able to see the results of any specific training to be sure that everything went well, and our trainers to see only the data they need.

We used Apps Script to tie all the pieces together to fulfill these requirements. We created a translation table in a spreadsheet to automate the translation of each survey, and persist the results using JSON two-dimensional arrays in a spreadsheet cell. Using this data, we present a web based front-end to show several charts and bring controls to filter the data in many ways. Each client is provided with a special access key that allows them to view the dashboards relevant to their organization. Clients log in via their existing Google Accounts, and the application presents and enforces appropriate access control rights that are depending upon their role in the organization.

With the recent addition of libraries in Apps Script, we were able to build this dashboard in a very short amount of time using a few of the notable script libraries linked to from the Apps Script documentation.

With ArrayLib’s method filterByText(data, columnIndex, value), we are able to implement filtering to enforce access controls by role:

if (e.parameter.selectedTrainer != All && 
    e.parameter.selectedTrainer != undefined)
  data = ArrayLib.filterByText(data, 
                               1, 
                               e.parameter.selectedTrainer);
if (e.parameter.selectedClient != All && 
    e.parameter.selectedClient != undefined)
  data = ArrayLib.filterByText(data, 
                               2, 
                               e.parameter.selectedClient.split(,));

With PivotChartsLib, we can create charts based on our survey results in only a few lines of code:

var grid = app.createGrid(3, 2);
var chart = PivotChartsLib.createColumnChart(data, 10);
grid.setWidget(0, 0, chart);
var chart = PivotChartsLib.createPieChart(data, 9);
grid.setWidget(0, 1, chart);
var chart = PivotChartsLib.createColumnChart(data, 6);
grid.setWidget(1, 0, chart);

Apps Script is all about Google Apps. Applications running on Apps Script handle authentication as well as integrating seamlessly with spreadsheets as well as other parts of Google Apps. With Apps Script, we have a powerful tool to tie together all of the more general services from Google Apps and build rich, domain specific applications for our clients.

Romain Vialard   profile | YouTube Romain Vialard is a Google Apps Change Management consultant at Revevol. Romain writes scripts to automate everyday tasks, add functionality and facilitate rapid adoption of cutting edge web infrastructures. As a Google Apps Script Top Contributor, he has also built many of the top scripts in the Apps Script Gallery, including the very popular Gmail Meter.

<div align="center"><a href="http://aturntolearn.blogspot.com/" title="What Did They Say!?"><img src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OIhmtxluCS0/ULwEfazkl1I/AAAAAAAADpM/MMMzxm23B0Y/s320/What+Did+They+Say+Wednesday.png" alt="What Did They Say!?" style="border:none;" /></a></div>

1. Share a story that one of your kids said on your blog!  If you dont have a blog, leave a comment with your story!
2. Use the HTML code at the top of this post to link back to the post!
3. Comment on the two blog posts before yours!

• Coaching Critical Thinking To Think Creatively!

• Part 1 - Whiteboard And I Are One!

• Part 2 - I Have Bragging Rights, Because I Am …

• Part 3 - Is PowerPoint Evil?
  
  "Of course, PowerPoint is not inherently evil, it is just poorly used. For those who are interested in using PowerPoint well, this article has a lot of material that will be of interest." - Stephen Downes
  

  
  

• Part 4 - No Stupid Questions! I am Serious!

• Part 5 - Show Up to Throw Up! 21st Century Thinking?

• Solution: 10 Secrets To Great Teaching (Part 1 and Part 2)

• Harun Yahya - An Invitation To The Truth

• Blackle And My Inspirational Sandcastle Adventure!

• Scivee And The Origin Of Yes We Can!

• 27 Inspiring Women Edubloggers

• The Secret - Get 100.000+ Followers On Twitter In 24 Hours!
  
  

• E-Learning 2.0 Workshop (Stephen Downes)
  "It would be pretty hard to write a more comprehensive (and kind) summary of my workshop than this by Zaid Ali Alsagoff, who deserves by thanks for acting as my videographer and assistant during the strenuous two-day event. What I like about this post was that the lessons were meta - not so much the bits about web 2.0 technology discussed during the session, but rather about the attitude and perspective on teaching their deployment represents. In my own mind, what we accomplished was best represented in two photos, this one at the beginning of the first day, where everything was ordered and proper, and this one near the end of the second day, where real learning was happening."
  - Stephen Downes

• Salman Khan Uses Microsoft Paint to Inspire Learning
  
  
  

• Ruzaimis Free Drawing Lessons Inspires Me to Sketch!

• Crashing The Workshop To Capture A Great Learning Moment!
  

"In one session, Zaid himself shared that he recorded one session of a professor (if I can remember correctly), just the voice and then he added a PowerPoint presentation of the talk which I thought was brilliant and at no extra cost." - Christopher Chew

FAMOUS PEOPLE

• The World Is Flat 3.0 (Thomas Friedman)

"I have a Dream (King)! Go Green (Friedman)! Yes, We Can (Obama)!" -Unknown

• Warren Buffetts MBA Talk Vs Evolution of Dance
  
  "Which is the better educational material, a speech by Warren Buffet, one of the richest people in the world, on investing, or a 6 minute video on the evolution of dance? The presumption of this post is that the crowd got it wrong, viewing the dance video 59 million times and watching Buffett only 98,000 times. But I learned more about dance in six minutes than I learned about stocks in 60 - and I trust the dance video a lot more, because you cant fake this stuff. Buffett gives us folksy advice like "you should buy what you know" and questionable bits like "if you learned about Wrigleys 40 years ago, you still know everything you need to know." Um, what? I agree with the author that there are "many excellent free online learning resources out there that are not being fully utilized by the global intelligence learning network." But I dont agree that Buffetts talk is one of them - and this illustrates perfectly the folly of trying to plan this or of depending on presumed authority to make the choices for us (Lesson learned, thanks Stephen!)" - Stephen Downes

• From Public Speaking Class To CEO Of Google
  Guess who?

• How Do You Motivate Staff? (Steve Ballmer)
  "I have four words for you: I LOVE THIS COMPANY! YEEEEEAAAAAS"
  

FUTURE

• TWIT Outshines Twitter In 2013!

FINALLY

• 69 Learning Adventures in 6 Galaxies (E-book)
  
  "...Available for free download at Scribd.com, the book brings together key “learning nuggets” as Zaid calls them with the arbitrary number 69 representing what he feels are the best learning chunks to appear over the past year on his blog, ZaidLearn....what has always been critical for this writer is the amount of reflection Zaid puts into the role of teacher. He constantly reviews his own practices to determine the impact he is having on his students making him an outstanding role model for those aspiring to the profession..." - Thomas J. Hanson
  

THATS ALL FOLKS!