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