Editor's Note: Guest author Phil Ridout is an independent consultant specialising in Knowledge Management. He is a facilitator for the Knowledge and Innovation Network (KIN) a business to business knowledge sharing network. Google Apps Script would significantly enhance the event management process.Create an Events page in the MemberSpace Google Site (in a standardised format)
Create a Calender Event in the Network Events Calendar maintained by facilitators
Announce the event on the MemberSpace news (announcements) page
Allow delegate self-registration
Send attendees a customized email confirmation when they register
Send joining instructions emails to all attendees immediately prior to the event The Solution To accomplish this automation, we have created an event management spreadsheet template with an accompanying form and script. Whenever an event is organised, the event facilitator copies the event management template and fills in standard data about the event in one of the sheets. So what’s in the script behind this? Before I started this project, I had never used Javascript. I used various tutorials on Apps Script documentation site to learn about Apps Script and discovered that a good starting point was the Simple Mail Merge Google Apps Script tutorial. The workflow of managing an event was relatively simple but required integration with various services such as Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Forms and Sites. Below is a description of how we used Apps Script to automate these tasks.1. Event Registration Email Whenever an attendee registers for an event, we need to send a customised confirmation email. This script is based on the Simple Mail Merge Google Apps Script tutorial code and we use an onFormSubmitMail Services in Apps Script are used to send these emails.2. Event Page in Sites The ‘Create Event Page’ script is invoked by the facilitator to create an event page (using Apps Script Sites Services ) in the MemberSpace using one of three page templates depending on the event type. Should any event details change, this script can be run again to delete the original page and create a new one with the amended details.3. Calendar entry in Events Calendar Once the event page has been created, the organiser creates an entry in the calendar by running the ‘Create Calendar Entry’ script which generates a calendar entry containing a link to the previously created event page in the MemberSpace. This script uses Apps Script Calendar Services.4. Email confirmation / joining instructions A week or so before the event takes place, joining instructions are sent to delegates using a menu option from the original spreadsheet. This runs a slightly modified version of the email script used in step 1.5. Event Announcement in Sites Finally, the organiser can ‘announce’ the event by running the ‘Announce Event’ script which places an announcement in the MemberSpace News page. (Actually, there are three ‘Special Interest Group’ News pages and one ‘General’ News page which are merged - by a time trigger driven script - into a single announcements stream that can subscribed to using a Site Services script the basis of which can be found here .)Posted by Phil Ridout, independent consultant
Want to weigh in on this topic? Discuss on Buzz
5 comments :
If you don't want to start re-glueing the tutorials mentioned by Phil here this is my latest iteration of a similar event system which uses Google Apps Script. The template and code is all freely available for reuse.
Enjoy!
Martin
Good story Phil and thanks for sharing Martin.
Regards
this is good, there are some software that needs no scripting
hi,
this article is good.
I have an application which creates events for different set of audience which is group of users and then we provide a way for users to add these events to calendar.
now since we want to utilize google apps can i get my functionality with a provision for little customization as per my business requirement.
kindly let me know.
Event apps introduced nowadays got an excellent and interactive functionality along with a provision of little customization asper the business specifications and requirements. The best part is that these applications not even require scripting.
Post a Comment