This continues a series of guest columns on how technology is reshaping hobbies and passions – basket weaving, rugby – whatever.
This time it is Mike O'Brien at appirio. appirio is one of the new generation of "cloud" systems integrators which works with software-as-a-service from salesforce.com, Google, Facebook and others. Here he writes about his baseball coaching.
"You know what it is like to be a tech-husband and tech-dad. The family expects you to know every arcane aspect of computing. But they dread any tech changes or innovations you propose. The groaning is particularly loud when you announce it is time to switch Internet service providers. This, of course, leads to the inevitable dread of switching email domains, new addresses and trying to inform friends and family that we've 'moved'. But there was little groaning when I signed up for Google Apps and tied it to our own family domain purchased through GoDaddy.com. Forever more we will have the same domain and email addresses regardless of our Internet provider.
It wasn't long before the entire family became experts at GMail and Google Calendar. With shared calendaring my wife could now schedule family events that I could see overlaid on my work schedule. She of course was thrilled with this and I could stay out of trouble by not missing important family events like school plays and such.
One of the things that we love about Google Apps is the incredible rate at which Google is innovating and adding new features to the products. Shortly after we locked onto Google Apps, they released Google Sites as part of the Apps suite. Think of Google Sites as an amazingly simple yet powerful wiki.
I quickly stood up a site for a family reunion just to learn the mechanics. Before long I had a complete site with everything from the floor plans of our ten room beach rental to the packing list reminder to chow schedules and much much more. After sharing it with the family across the country it became a virtual gathering place for us to share ideas, plans and excitement of the upcoming reunion. Best of all, there was no learning curve for aunts, uncles, grandparents or the kids - it's just a super-intuitive environment.
So the success we had with the family site really opened my eyes to other uses of Google Sites. I've helped numerous friends, family and neighbors stand up their own sites for various things but the one that I'm most passionate about is our Buccaneers Baseball Site. As one of the little league team coaches, I have the usual responsibilities of communicating practice and game schedules, inclement weather plans, fund raising events and the list goes on. So after socializing the idea with the other coaches over a year ago, we put the site together and it has truly taken center stage for all means of communication and collaboration when we are not at the fields.
And I'm not talking about just the coaches - rather, the site is used by the kids, the parents and proud grandparents. Of course, for security reasons we control access to the site but once you have a login and password, you can edit to your hearts content. Aside from the obvious stuff to include on the site such as game schedules, field directions and contact information, we are using the site for things like:
· Instructional 'how to' videos - batting, stealing, sliding, ect. There is a wealth of these on the web and Google sites makes it super easy to embed these Google or Youtube videos
· Batting practice videos - you can tell the kid a hundred times that they are dropping their shoulder through the swing but seeing is believing and it's made a huge difference for our boys
· Game Summaries - one of my favorite parts of the site. Parents take turns writing game summaries each weekend, which are always very entertaining
· Slideshows - each player has their own page with their playing stats, complemented by a slideshow (powered by Picasa)
· A ton of other fun stuff like tournament plans, fundraisers, practice routines
· And of course, our all important code of conduct
Google Sites has completely changed the way both our family and our baseball team communicates, collaborates and stays organized. And of course - it's fun tech!"
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