Posted by Webmissy on June 1st, 2007 in News bulletin

Google, the mammoth search engine company, has a program called Google Apps. HEdCen.Com was accepted to the program. Despite being a .com domain, HEdCen was approved for the service that is reserved for .edu accounts. It may not mean much to those unfamiliar with Google services; suffice to say that it helped a lot that at the time of application, HEdCen.Com was a fully developed site which proved that it is indeed, more than anything, an educational institution-based web site.

What do we get from the acceptance of HEdCen.Com to the Google Apps program?

First, we must make it clear that the Google Apps services may be availed of only by those with yourname@hedcen.com accounts. Although the main page, a screenshot of which you see above, is viewable by the public, that’s all the public will have access to.

So what services are we talking about?

1) We just got ourselves a better e-mail service (absolutely no ads) integrated with Google Talk, Google’s chat service. Those who already have yourname@hedcen.com e-mail accounts may be wondering why they can’t access the mail server. Well, because the old e-mail service has been disabled. We will be re-creating the yourname@hedcen.com e-mail accounts in the new server.

2) We now have an event calendar where members can add their own entries. There are several settings for this service. Members can create private calendars or publicly-viewable calendars.

3) Document and spreadsheet viewing and sharing. This will be of particular interest to the HEdCen administrators and faculty members who will find it very useful for tallying test scores and grades.

4) There is a chat service, Google Talk, which comes bundled with the e-mail service or which may be downloaded separately. Google Talk has no emoticons (smilies) but the good news is that there are other chat clients — with all the smilies that the young ones can ever want — that can be used with the same yourname@hedcen.com account.

5) Then, there is the start page which members can customize depending on their interests. Like music? Sodoku? Gadgets? There is even a “word of the day” to help enrich the vocabulary. The left side of the start page cannot be changed though. The webmaster (Webmissy — that’s me) opted to populate the left side permanently with links to the member’s mailbox and, below that, a weather forecast service.

The links are as follows:

Mail : http://gmail.hedcen.com
Start page: http://services.hedcen.com
Docs : http://docs.hedcen.com
Calendar: http://calendar.hedcen.com

Note that unless you already have a yourname@hedcen.com account, you might only see a login box in some of those services. We’ll fix that soon by fasttracking the creation of the new e-mail accounts.

Please note, too, that the DNS servers were switched only a few hours ago and, depending on how fast your internet service providers (ISPs) clear out their caches, the URLs might not be visible until the propagation of the new DNS is complete.

That said, someone needs sleep very badly.

Edited @ 8.37 p.m.