Comments on Martin Hamilton's blog: Google Apps for Alumni - 1,000 users in our first ...

Fazil - after a student has finished at our instit...

2011-06-14T22:37:14.476+01:00

Fazil - after a student has finished at our institution we leave a grace period before nuking their IT account, files etc.

Historically this was their entire online presence as a Loughborough student, but with the take-up of the Google tools this is now primarily about deleting their central University filestore.

I'd like us to be able to map users' Google Docs areas to a drive on the logged-in machine, which is how they presently interact with our central filestore. However, this isn't a Google product (yet), and some of the third party options come with a significant price tag for a user population the size of ours.

One other data point that I would add re Google for Alumni is that we have a guaranteed unique (never reassigned) student ID number, which we poke into the user profile on the Google side in order to disambiguate potential clashes over account names - this facility wasn't available when we started the project.

We use the gContact:externalId attribute in the user profile for this. The URL of the profile feed looks like http://www.google.com/m8/feeds/profiles/domain/$domain/full/$email, in case that's useful.

Cheers,

Martin

Martin, Can you provide any additional informatio...

2011-06-14T16:47:26.224+01:00

Martin,

Can you provide any additional information on this - how do you flag your graduating students in the current student domain?

fazilr AT Gmail dot Com

David - I've just emailed you separately about...

2010-09-17T11:06:33.694+01:00

David - I've just emailed you separately about this! Happy to share code, although I would note that we're mostly cheating and using the excellent Google Apps Manager: http://code.google.com/p/google-apps-manager/

Cheers,

Martin

After struggling with this very same issue for sev...

2010-09-16T17:40:49.254+01:00

After struggling with this very same issue for several weeks now, what a relief it is to hear that it 'can' be done! Would you be willing to share your code with a fellow educator?

I think you have to look at this from a slightly d...

2010-08-09T23:14:44.581+01:00

I think you have to look at this from a slightly different point of view - what we're aiming for in the long run (don't have this in place yet, though) is for the community that you were a part of as a student to simply persist on your departure. So, no need to find your old friends again on LinkedIn, Facebook etc.

I think Google Groups corresponding to module options and courses are going to be an excellent way of doing this. The initial level of interest in the service suggests that we're on the right track, but it will be interesting to look back in the months to come...

What our guys do in terms of fundraising and advancement runs in parallel, of course. But we're not going to be using Google Apps as our CRM - we have Raiser's Edge for this.

Hi Martin, Google apps for alumni sounds too good...

2010-08-09T20:54:20.449+01:00

Hi Martin,

Google apps for alumni sounds too good to be true. Are you able to provide a secure alumni directory via Google Apps? I can't imagine my alma mater (Calvin College) giving up their online directory.

Thank you,
Luke Robinson