School is back in full swing which means I have resumed my duties as webmaster for GameZombie.tv, who now has their own class in the Telecommunications Department. Our fearless leader, Spencer Stuart, has given me complete technology freedom to run the website and get us organized more as a company instead of a loosely affiliated group of students. I chose Google Apps to manage our small business for two very simple reasons – 1.) It’s Google. 2.) It’s free. When it comes to Software-as-a-service, it doesn’t get much better!The primary purpose of using Google Apps is to give GameZombie.tv a legitimate and professional looking face to the world. We used to correspond with business contacts and each other using our personal accounts. Not only did team members have to remember whose username at random email server was whose, so did anyone we contacted like sponsors, production companies, and event organizers. Now everyone has their own first.last@gamezombie.tv user account so they can correspond with confidence and class. It personally helped me separate GZ related emails that used to be fed into my school mailbox. Now I can keep track of tasks, document attachments, and conversations with ease since Google Apps email works just like Gmail. One of the best features is the ability to share everyone’s contacts across the company so when the business team strikes a new deal, the public relations guys will have the business team’s contacts ready and available to discuss promoting the new deal.

Being security minded at all times, I thought we were getting to the point where a publicly viewable Google Group was no place to discuss upcoming feature pieces, share files, and talk about the inner workings of our operation. With Google Apps, we can set sites, docs, and calendars to be only accessible by GZ members. It became evidently important to keep in-house discussions private when a flame war broke out after Destructoid wrote up a nice piece on GameZombie.

The latest and greatest feature I’ve found from Google Apps (actually just plain old Google Docs) is the ability to create a form from a spreadsheet. For the new class, we needed to collect tons of information from everyone like email, cell, blog, usernames on various networking sites, etc. This would have been VERY tedious if everyone would have had to gather all of this info in an email, send it to Charles the manager, and then have him organize and store it somehow. Instead, I created a form in Google Docs that streamlines this process. All I had to do was embed an iframe and when people submitted these simple forms, the information was fed directly into a spreadsheet on Google Docs that I shared with whoever needed the info. The forms are amazingly responsive! I sat next to someone who filled it out on their computer and within seconds I saw the results on my laptop in the spreadsheet window I had open. These forms also allow you do to some statistical analysis. We weren’t collected age or ratings, but I’m keeping it in mind for the future.

We may want to get some user feedback about the site or video content. Instead of using something like SurveyMonkey, we could run something very similar on our own site. Maybe when we roll out the new design we can get some usability feedback using one of these forms…

The last feature of Google Apps is the ability to chat via Gtalk so if you ever want to chat about GZ feel free to IM me: max.beatty@gamezombie.tv