This week, I want to talk
about how you can use Google Sites as an Intranet
solution for your business. Google Sites is a simple
solution for building websites, or Intranet solutions, for
those of you that don't know, an Intranet is simply an internal website, generally used for sharing
private information. And, essentially what Google Sites does, is it gives you a way to
build a website or an Intranet very, very easily, and without
any need for a knowledge of web design, or development,
or anything like that. And as I said, we're going
to try and do that now. So, I'm going to give you a couple
of examples of Google Sites, so we've used it for example,
to build this training site that we have which is on
learn.damsontraining.com, it's public, so you can take a look. And, we use it to bring
together all of the training materials that customers
might need, and embed videos, and tips and tricks, and PDF resources, and things like that. Our friends over at
steegle.com, these guys are the expert in Google Sites
and you should absolutely check out their website. They have some fantastic
examples of Google Sites, including their own one
as well, which I've just opened up here, so a couple
of examples of customers that they have created
websites for on Google Sites. Residential Care Home there. And then, this is an Intranet
solution that they've created here, none of these links work, but it just sort of gives
you an idea of how you can kind of embed things. And as I said, their own
website as well, they have a fantastic amount of resources
on there, on Google Sites, I would recommend that
you take a look at that. And a huge amount of examples
of Google Sites, so definitely check those out if you
have any more information that you're looking for on Google Sites. Firstly, accessing Google
Sites, you click on the little waffle menu here, and on
the drop down you'll see Google Sites as an option. You click on that, and what
it will bring you to is the old Google Sites. We're still calling it
the new Google Sites, although it's been out
for quite some time. That is what I'm going to
focus on, because the old, or classic Google Sites, is going away. So, I click on the new
Google Sites on the bottom, and it brings me to this
little page where I have all of my Google Sites that I have access to. Then, I click the little plus
button in the bottom right hand corner, and that's going
to open up a new page for me. So, now what I can do is, I can create my page here. So, I'm going to call it
Hyper Global Intranet. Hyper Global is the name of my company. And I'm going to expand
it out a little bit. So, everything is kind of
drag and drop, and really, really easy for me to change stuff. I'm going to change the
background image here, so I can go in, and I
can actually select from a whole array of images that Google has. One of my favourite ones here is this guy, so I'm going to click on this
one, and Google will actually adjust it and make it
readable for my end users. I'm going to embed a
little carousel in here, 'cause I want to have a little
carousel of some images. I can upload images or I
can select them, from either my Google Drive or my albums. So, I'm going to go into my
albums, I have a little event album in here, and I'm going
to select a bunch of images. Okay, and then I can expand
my little carousel out, and it's just going to browse
through those images now. And then, what I'm going to do
is I'm going to put in a little divider, and I'd like
to put in a calendar, because I'd like to have a
team calendar; when my team come on here, I'd like to
have a little calendar for them to see. So, I'm going to put in
the sales team calendar. And I can actually decide
what settings I want for this particular calendar. So, I don't need the navigation
buttons or anything like that, I want a week view, one week view. And I'm going to expand that out. And I do want some sort of title on here, so it's obvious what it is. So, I'm going to put in a little text box. I'm going to make it a subheading. I'm going to call it team calendar. I'm going to just pull this
up, so you can actually just grab it, and just pull it
up, and it will actually move it to the top. And I can emphasise it as well, if I want. I'm going to centre it, I
actually might make it a heading, it's a little bit small. So, now I've got my team calendar. And then, once you've got one
of these, you can actually copy them, which I find easier. You just drop that one down,
and I can change this one then to something else. So, I might have Launch Bar. And underneath the launch
bar, I might put in a couple of images. So, I could embed an image;
I could upload it or select it again, you could run a search. So, If I wanted to have
like a little launch bar for Gmail, I could do a
little search for Gmail logo. We could embed this, I just
shrink it in a little bit. And we might make it a little bit smaller. And then, I might also want... I'm going to show you how
to turn these into links in a second. Okay, so now I have my three images. And these could be linked to
any site, but in this case, I'm going to turn these
into links to www.gmail.com. Okay, so you can imagine
you could have smaller ones. And again, you could move these around, so maybe you want your
launch bar at the top, above your team calendar,
you've changed your mind. You can actually just grab
these, and pull them up here. So, now my launch bar's at the top. And if any stage you want to preview it, you can just hit preview,
and it will show you what it looks like with your images, and your launch bar, and your team calendar. So, that's what I have so far. So, from Google Drive, I'm going
to embed a shared team drive. So, a team drive that
everybody is using, or a shared drive as its now called. So, I'm going to embed
this actually in here. I'm going to select it
and then click insert. That's going to embed
that team drive in there, and again, I could do a little
heading here if I wanted. I could pull this down. I could call this Team Drive. And again, it's listing
all of the documents out. Okay, so we're going to
create two new pages. One is going to be my feedback page, and then the other one is
going to be my time off request page. And then, what I can do
is, in each of these pages, my plan is to actually embed
a particular form into it. I just find, personally,
it makes it easier. So, I've got two forms
that I want to embed, my time off form and my feedback form. My time off form is there, and I just click on it
and then click insert. It will actually embed it in
here, and I'm going to link back to it on the other page. So, we can pull this across, it's actually embedded it
twice, that was my fault. I'm going to make this a
little bit bigger as well. I'm going to make this header simpler, you can actually change the header type, if you just want a title
only for your request. I'm going to go to my feedback page, and I'm going to do
the same with this one. And I'm going to embed a
different form into this page, and this forms going
to be my feedback form. That's my feedback form there. I'm going to do the same thing,
I'm just going to put it in the centre, and pull it across. I've got three pages now,
what I'm going to do is at the bottom, in my useful links,
I'm going to embed an image, and one of them is going to be feedback. We've got a little feedback image, and I'm going to link
this to the feedback page. And then, I'm going to do
another one, this is going to be my time off. Time off, not sure what kind
of image I'll get for that. Take some time off in your
life, that could work. I'm going to link this guy to
the time off request, okay. So, now, when we publish the
page and we go to the publish link, so we can go to
our little publish link. And I'll leave this site up
for people to have a look at. Now, we have our Hyper Global Intranet, we have our Launch Bar, we have our team calendar, our team drive, which is embedded, and now, we have our two links. Which, if I click, will actually
bring me to the feedback form that people can fill out. And the other one will bring
people to the other page, which is the time off
request, and they're also up at the top as well. Okay? So, that's just a really,
really fast overview of Google Sites as an Intranet solution. And, just to show you
how easy it is to create a Google Site. And, I kind of find it as
the connector between your Gmail, your calendar, your Google Drive, that it can kind of pull all
those together, and just make it easier for teams to work together. So, that's it for me, I
hope you enjoyed this week's update, and I will talk to you next week.
