Moving to Google Apps - our experience

Many other Wycliffe organisations in the Wycliffe Global Alliance have moved to Google Apps, and we decided to join them. Here are my experiences:

Google Apps is free for UK charities, which is an attractive price. However it doesn't mean that it doesn't cost in time. Doing the migrations, plus user training and support all take non-finite amounts of time.

As well as the familiar Google tools, such as Gmail, Calendar and drive/documents, you also get the management interface so you can create and suspend users, turn services on and off and generally manage the stuff.

I've been disappointed with a number of problems that we've had. They are mostly to do with the migration. If you read the forums you find that some of them have been around for a few years with no sign of them being fixed. For example, when you view email that's been migrated using IMAP from Outlook all the dates on the emails are set to the same value. This is because the migration process sets the received date to the migration date. There is a workaround - display the sent date. However, it's a bug - fix it already Google.

There are some Outlook features that are lost when email is synced back to Gmail, but I'm not entirely surprised that Google won't implement features across the board just because Outlook uses them. More information here.

The standard package doesn't include backup so you may want to purchase Google Vault just in case Google loses your email.


If your users already have Google accounts then it copes quite well with multiple accounts in the browser. There are a couple of exceptions - Drive and Blogger require you to log out of all accounts and log into a single one. It's not a surprise that Blogger doesn't do that, as it's a pretty dormant product, but Drive seems like a key part of the offering. Maybe it's being worked on.

On the plus side you do get other Google Apps features, like Drive and Hangouts which are of corporate use. Overall the experience is positive, but if you do decide to switch then allow plenty of time for migration.

Update: I found information about future updates on the Google Apps release calendar and linked newsletters. It looks like there's a fairly healthy amount of work being done on improving Google apps, if not the migration tools.

How hard is it to change your email address?

We're in the middle of moving to Google Apps (I'll write on the experience when we're nearer the end). As part of the process we've taken the opportunity to change our email addresses to use the wycliffe.org.uk domain. So I've gone round various websites changing my email address. The process varies from simply changing a field once you've logged in, to a more complex flow involving verifying the new address. Some sites I couldn't change it, so I had to contact someone to do it by hand.

Some sites have the email address as the username, but you can't change it. I think this is just badly designed. It's not unusual for people to change emails, or for anything that might be work related, for a different person to take over a role. When the old email that hangs around is for someone who has died it just looks bad.

So when designing your site login system, consider how easy you want to make it for someone to change their email address.

I saw a post on a blog, I can't remember which, where someone had wanted to change their email, or retrieve a password on their own site. They were surprised how poor the experience was given the amount of effort they'd put into other parts of their site. Let me know if you've come across that post too and I'll link it here.

IT and Bible translation

An article I wrote on IT and Bible Translation has been published on the Kingdom Code blog. Andy Geers approached me a while back and asked me to write it. I'm just waiting for a flood of email to my inbox now.

You want a Bible text API? I've got three!

I've just finished putting a little Bible text widget onto our Jesus in my Language page. It cycles through various Bible texts. It runs through the languages in reverse order because the interesting scripts are all at the end of the list.

It uses the Digital Bible Platform API, which is not to be confused with the Digital Bible Library API. There's also the Bible Search API. All of them require you to register to get an API key. I can't easily tell how many Bible versions are available in all of them but I think they all have hundreds. Wycliffe USA is one of the partners behind the Digital Bible Library, which is one of the the ones that I didn't use.

I have previously blogged my persoanl thoughts on Bible text and copyright.

Blackbaud RE User group - news about RE NXT

I went to a Blackbaud RE User group on 23 October. They started off with introductions and some organisational changes - new CEO, new Account Directors who are over the Account Managers (one of whom has already visited me), and more work on improving support.

They talked about upcoming improvements to RE, including the long awaited change so that email addresses aren't linked to a postal address. They emphasised their commitment to working on RE, and at the moment seem to be slowly introducing ideas suggested on their UserVoice suggestion site.

There were some slides about Online Express and my blog entry on it got a mention.

Then there was a session on mobile, and after lunch, the thing I was most interested in - RE NXT (don't call it Next, they don't like that).

There are some good introductions to it out there, so here are a few links:

Purple Vision
IT For Charities
RE Decoded from Zeidman

If you haven't read those then this is the summary: hosted RE with a web front end that you can still access in the old way. The initial release in June next year will be the front end features that fundraisers use. In time other roles will have their bits NXTified until you can do every bit of RE without using the older interface.

My comment on RE NXT before I'd been to the user group was:

"I think one disadvantage of the fact that the underlying data is remaining unchanged is that we're stuck with the slow pace of change of that. For example, how long have people been asking for an email address which isn't tied to a postal address. I think I read this is coming in an upcoming RE release, but they only happen about once a year. I expect to see rapid updates with the interface, as that's easy to roll out, like with BBOX. I don't think we'll see the underlying data changing so quickly though."

I heard from a Blackbaud person that RE NXT will have its own data, which it's going to have to do to store, for example, someone's web dashboard layout. So it can build on top of the RE data, but it can't really break the underlying model.

My opinion is that RE NXT is a good direction to go with RE to keep it viable for a few more years. There is no data upgrade pain, though there will be a user education exercise. The phased approach to bring in the new interface will bring IT support challenges, but is also a more gentle process than an interface change for everyone. It also means we don't have to wait for years for Blackbaud to finish everything before releasing it.

Ada Lovelace Day 2014 - Rachel Andrew

I was reminded by this blog post by LornaJane that it's Ada Lovelace Day. This year the woman whose achievements I admire is Rachel Andrew. (2013 Kathy Sierra, 2012 Aleks Krotoski) That picture above isn't her, but comes from Sydney Padua.

• She is, together with Drew McLellan, responsible for writing Perch, a small and neat content management system that I probably haven't written about enough. It is very impressive for being just enough for a small website, whilst also now having a bigger sibling which doesn't detract from the original. I dived into the code a while back to write my own plugin and I was very impressed by its inner workings.
• She's also written books, none of which I've actually read. However from the extracts published on her blog if I wanted to make a profitable side project I know I'd buy her Handbook on the subject.
• She shares knowledge through conference talks, articles on other sites and most recently helping freelancers with the changes to VAT rules. All of this is good for the webby business.
• (Update:) she has technical editing skills.

Blackbaud Online Express direct debit bug workaround

My opinion of Online Express has gone a bit downhill since I discovered a bug in the Direct Debit functionality. It always seems to be UK specific features that have bugs. There was a time when after every RE upgrade I would have to check Gift Aid carefully to see if they'd fixed previous bugs and introduced any new ones.

The bug is that if the donor chooses direct debit but doesn't tick "Make this a monthly gift" then a cash gift gets created. Whilst it's possible to have one-off direct debits this cash gift isn't a recurring gift, and so you can't generate an instruction from it. I consider it a bug, but the person handling my case suggested I put something on the BBOX UserVoice website. So if you want to lobby Blackbaud to fix this you can do it on these suggestions:
Checked box as default for recurring gifts?
Allow forms which only have direct debit as an option

I've since been approached by a couple of people who work on BBOX in the US to discuss it, and so I've given my input there.

This is the workaround to make sure that people are warned if they choose direct debit without ticking that box. You need to put this code into the waitUntilExists code as described in my previous blog post.