This is a special guest post from Martin Hamilton, head of Internet Services at Loughborough University. Martin reports on the first Google Apps for Education UK User Group meeting, which Google's Claudio Cherubino took part in, and shares slide decks from the day.

In February 2011 I organized the first Google Apps for Education UK User Group meeting, held at Loughborough University. Find out more about it from http://guug11.lboro.ac.uk or check out #guug11 on Twitter. Many thanks to Claudio and the gang at Google Developer Relations for giving me the opportunity to say a few words here about it.

In my community (UK EDU) Google Apps is a pretty big deal right now - a lot of people are moving to Google as a way of giving their students and faculty a state of the art service for communication and collaboration, whilst also making significant cost savings by comparison with their old in-house systems. A recent survey I carried out of University IT Directors indicated that 50% were either already running Google Apps, or working on a project to put the service into place. So the message for developers is that this is a big potential market - with over 10 million Google Apps for Education users.

We recently collaborated with Google on a Case Study around our own experiences from “Loughborough goes Google”. I’ve pulled out a few highlights from this below:

• £250,000 saving on server hardware, cooling and power over refreshing the old in-house email system (five year stats)
• Enabling new services – notably 95% uptake of Calendar, 70% uptake for Docs
• Retention of the student’s digital identity on graduation, which would have been impossible to resource in-house (alumni get to keep their mail, docs, contacts, etc)
• Broader and deeper engagement between IT and the student body (students unanimously chose Google Apps)
• Feedback loop as ideas are fed back to Google and actioned

For our own implementation of Google Apps we made extensive use of Google’s APIs to manage our users. We also worked closely with the Google team developing the “multidomain” support for Google Apps, to create our Google for Alumni service.

We heard some similar stories at the guug11 event, and a whole lot more. Here are some personal highlights for me from the day...

Niall Sclater described the Open University’s approach to migrating nearly 200,000 students to Google Apps, and integration between Google and the widely used Moodle software.

Zoe Ross and Mark Allen talked about their work with Google Apps in schools. This is truly inspiring stuff. Just think: today’s four year olds who are happily using Google Docs on their school’s iPads (as at the primary school Mark teaches at) will be tomorrow’s undergraduates! I’m cautiously optimistic that the easy access to developer tools and APIs that Google provides (seen App Inventor for Android?) will result in more kids learning to code.

Tony Hirst and Martin Hawksey described the multifarious ways in which Google Apps can be used and abused for mashup purposes. Did you realise that you could treat Google Docs spreadsheets like a database and execute “SQL” on them? Or that you could import a table from a page of HTML as spreadsheet table cells in Google Docs?

Guug11 mashing up-google_apps

View more presentations from Tony Hirst

Although this wasn’t specifically an event for developers (we had people attending from a wide range of backgrounds and organizations) one of my aims was to raise awareness across the board of the extent to which Google Apps is now a platform in its own right. This is something that I suspect regular Google Apps users mostly only have a hazy awareness of, and even some developers may not fully appreciate.

So what do I mean by platform? For me, this is the combination of:

1. ATOM based RESTful APIs - e.g. check out the Google Sites API, very nice!
2. Apps Script - leverage your Javascript expertise to code against most of the Google Apps APIs, with a bunch of helper functions to make your life easier
3. Google Apps Marketplace - sell your tightly integrated apps (using single sign-on to the Google Apps domain and, for example, Gmail contextual gadgets) via the Google Apps equivalent of the Android Marketplace
4. App Engine for hosting your code at “Google scale”

I thought Google’s Claudio Cherubino did an excellent job of bringing all this together with his talk (delivered via Google Chat due to rail travel disruption!) on developing for the Google Apps Marketplace, and introducing the Apps Marketplace for Education, which had just launched. Here’s a short video on the Apps Marketplace for Education.

If this all sounds interesting, take a look at the guug11 website sometime to find out more about the event and catch the rest of the talks. You may also be interested in my blog post describing how the guug11 site was constructed.

Posted by Michael Mahemoff, Google Developer Relations