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Posted by Claudio Cherubino, Google Apps APIs Team

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• code snippets and samples
• reviews of customer integration and deployment cases
• interviews with developers on best practices for developing in Apps
• voting on most-requested developer extensions in Apps
• discussion of OAuth roadmap
• references to OpenID
• smart ways to do logging (and analysis/reporting) in AppEngine, etc.
• Storing JSON in AppEngine

Editors note: This has been cross-posted with the Google Analytics blog and the Google Developers blog -- Jan Kleinert

Many people have been asking for a simple way to put Google Analytics data into a Google Spreadsheet. Once the data is inside a Google Spreadsheet, users can easily manipulate Google Analytics data, create new visualizations, and build internal dashboards.

So today we released a new integration that dramatically reduces the work required to put Google Analytics data into any Apps Script supported product, such as Google Docs, Sites, or Spreadsheets.

Here’s an example of Google Analytics data accessed through Apps Script and displayed in a Google Spreadsheet.

Custom API Dashboards - No Code Required

We know that a popular use case of this integration will be to create dashboards that automatically update. To make this easy to do, we’ve added a script to the Spreadsheets script gallery that handles all this work - no code required. The script is called Google Analytics Report Automation (Magic).

This script is a great template for starting your own project, and we’ve had many internal Google teams save hours of time using this tool. Here’s a video demoing how to build a dashboard using this script:

You can find this script by opening or creating a Google Spreadsheet, clicking Tools -> Script Gallery and searching for “analytics magic”.

Writing Your Own Script

Of course many developers will want to write their own code. With the new Analytics – Apps Script integration, you can request the total visitors, visits, and pageviews over time and put this data into a spreadsheet with just the following code:

// Get Data.
var results = Analytics.Data.Ga.get(
    tableId,
    startDate,
    endDate,
    ga:visitors,ga:visits,ga:pageviews,
    {‘dimensions’: ‘ga:date’});

// Output to spreadsheet.
var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().insertSheet();
sheet.getRange(2, 1, results.getRows().length, headerNames.length)
    .setValues(results.getRows());

// Make Sandwich.

To get started now, read our Automated Access to Google Analytics Data in Google Spreadsheets tutorial. Also check out the Google Analytics Apps Script reference docs.

Solving Business Problems

Are you ready to start building solutions using Google Analytics and Google Apps Script?

We’d love to hear new ways you use this integration to help manipulate, visualize and present data to solve business problems. To encourage you to try out this integration, we are giving out Google Analytics developer t-shirts to the first 15 developers to build a solution using both APIs.

To be eligible, you must publish your solution to either the Chrome Web Store or the Spreadsheets Script Gallery and include a description of a business problem the script solves. We’ll then collect these scripts and highlight the solutions in an upcoming blog post. After you publish your script, fill out this form to share what you’ve built.

We’re looking forward to seeing what you can do with this integration.

Nick Mihailovski   profile Nick is a Senior Developer Programs Engineer working on the Google Analytics API. In his spare time he likes to travel around the world.

It’s time for the 2012 General Election in the United States and along with it comes the tedious process of finding your voter registration, polling sites, times, directions, etc. The previously announced Google Civic Information API provides a great service to programmatically obtain much of this information based on the your home address. Google Apps Script makes it really quick and easy to build a web application that queries this information and uses various Google services to organize and track your information.

Election Info is a sample application built using Apps Script that can:

• Query the Google Civic Information API to find polling locations and hours using client side JavaScript and AJAX.
• Display polling information using HtmlService with jQuery for a clean effective UI.
• Generate static maps via UrlFetch and the MapsService to show polling maps and directions.
• Create a calendar event for election day with your polling location using the Calendar service.
• Generate a bring-along document with poll directions and hours using the Document service.
• Send you an email with a summary with your polling place information using the Gmail service.
• Store your previous searches in UserProperties so it will remember your likely home address the next time you launch the app.

As you can see, this is a comprehensive sample app that is useful while also highlighting key Apps Script capabilities.

Install the app from the Chrome Web Store. Check back soon as we will be writing a blog post with details and sample code on how the sample was built.

Arun Nagarajan   profile | twitter Arun is a Developer Advocate on Google Apps Script. Arun works closely with the community of partners, customers and developers to help them build compelling applications on top of Google Apps using Apps Script. In the past, he spent over 9 years building and designing platforms and infrastructure for enterprise mobile applications.. Arun is originally from the Boston area and enjoys basketball and snowboarding.

• There’s minimal impact on the weight of your apps. As the client library is a stub to Google Play Services, incorporating the API has minimal impact on the size of your .apk binaries, resulting in faster downloads, fewer updates, and smaller execution footprint.
  
• User files are automatically synced between different devices (provided the app has the same namespace and is signed with the same key).
  
• Any device running the Gingerbread or later releases of Android and Google Play Services will automatically have support for the Google Drive Android API.

// Launch user interface and allow user to select file
    IntentSender i = Drive.DriveApi
        .newOpenFileActivityBuilder()
        .setMimeType(new String[] { “text/plain” })
        .build(mGoogleApiClient);
    startIntentSenderForResult(i, REQ_CODE_OPEN, null, 0, 0, 0);

The Challenge

1. Are our customers asking for it?
2. Will it give us access to a significantly larger lead flow?
3. Do the people that use these apps typically pay for them?
4. Would our target customer expect to find our type of tool there?
5. What does the competition look like on each platform?
6. What is the scope of the development effort?

Decision Time

The Details

1. Universal Navigation and Single Sign-on
2. Move Data to and from Google Spreadsheets
3. Attach Google Docs to Any Row
4. Open any attached file as a Google Doc
5. Synchronize Contacts
6. Display & Manage dates between Sheets & Calendars
7. Share individual parts of the sheet via Gmail

We divided the development into two phases based largely on the availability of the specific Google Apps APIs. Mail and Calendar were phase 2, everything else was phase 1. We had a single, mostly dedicated developer for the effort.

Stage 1

We first implemented single-sign-on via OpenID and Google Docs API integration using OAuth for standard Google Accounts. This included data import/export, attaching Google Docs to rows, uploading office documents to Google Docs, and importing Contacts. We then extended this integration to support Google Apps users. These features were rolled out in Q3 of 2009, well in advance of the Google Apps Marketplace launch. It took a senior developer roughly 6 weeks to implement this first stage. With the core integration features completed, we were able to quickly implement new Apps Marketplace functionality, including Universal Navigation and the Licensing API, as they were made available in the sandbox.

Stage 2

We are developing full-featured Google Calendar integration, utilizing both the Google Calendar Data API and Calendar Event Gadgets, to be delivered in May 2010. Gmail integration will follow quickly, utilizing both the OAuth access to IMAP and SMTP and Gmail Contextual Gadgets. With the experience we have integrating other APIs, the development of these features is greatly simplified, as the infrastructure – implementation of OpenID, OAuth, and the GData Java Client Library – is already in place.

The Mechanics

We chose to enter three variations of Smartsheet into the Google Apps Marketplace: two mainstream solutions and one emerging technology solution.

Mainstream:

1. Smartsheet Sales Pipeline for Google Apps
2. Smartsheet Project Management for Google Apps

Emerging Technology:

1. Smartsheet Crowdsourcing for Google Apps

The decision to start with the Project Management and Sales Pipeline applications was based on the belief that they would have the broadest appeal to two Google Apps customer types: Small Businesses and Large Scale Education customers.

We included Smartsheet Crowdsourcing as a test of an entirely unique product that pushes an emerging trend.

The Results

Google Apps Marketplace has performed very well across several of Smartsheets key performance indicators.

Strong Leads - the percentage of signups that accrue a statistically significant quantity of behavioral actions within the application. A strong lead is highly correlated with an eventual paying customer.
Convert to Paid - the percentage of total leads that eventually become paying customers.
Average MRR - Monthly Recurring Revenue is the average monthly spend of the leads that become paying customers.


The statistics are fantastic, and have improved the profitability of our customer acquisition programs significantly. Today, we get "free" leads generated by SEO, PR and buzz (Non-Paid). These are the Holy Grail source of profitable customers. We add $2,160 a month in recurring revenue for every 1,000 leads that come in via non-paid channels. At $1,740 a month per 1,000 leads, Google Apps Marketplace is also a very profitable channel that brings up the overall averages (subtract the 20% Google is planning to charge for Apps customers).

None of the statistics above matter without lead volume to power them. Thats where the Google Apps Marketplace really makes these numbers sing. Weve seen a very meaningful increase in high quality, non-paid lead flow directly attributable to Google Apps customers.

Our customers cite Smartsheets tight integration with Googles Data APIs as a key factor in their decision to purchase. A common theme emerging in the feedback is reflected in this comment from a manufacturing company president: "Smartsheet is making the Docs component of Google Apps more useful to our team."

Moving Forward

Customer requests for features and enhancements to our Apps integration have already started pouring in. They are great guideposts toward attracting a larger percentage of these great Apps users.

The Google Apps Marketplace is a rich source of customers, so staying above the noise as it attracts more ISVs will be a priority. Were confident we can continue refining our product and services to deliver a superior solution. And, well count on the Google team to value customer success and application utility as primary criteria for rating and ranking the vendor directories.

By Brent Frei, Smartsheet

Did you know you can write a complete Google Drive App with JavaScript that runs completely in the web browser? You can! Your browser-based application, including Chrome extensions, can take advantage of our client library, or just use CORS requests to the API.

Your app can support all the functionality of the Drive API, including uploading files, downloading files, tracking changes, listing files and managing revisions. Also you can take advantage of our user interface components that make opening and sharing files easy.

We are really keen to offer first-class support to browser-based applications, so we have added JavaScript snippets to all our API reference documentation. Please let us know how we are doing by posting to Stack Overflow.

Want to try it out? Check out our Javascript Quickstart Guide, which helps you get your application up and running in five minutes or so.

Ali Afshar profile | twitter Tech Lead, Google Drive Developer Relations. As an eternal open source advocate, he contributes to a number of open source applications, and is the author of the PIDA Python IDE. Once an intensive care physician, he has a special interest in all aspects of technology for healthcare

Google Docs supports sharing collections and their contents with others. This allows multiple Google Docs resources to be shared at once, and for additional resources added to the collection later to be automatically shared.

Class.io, an EDU application on the Google Apps Marketplace, uses this technique. When a professor creates a new course, the application automatically creates a Google Docs collection for that course and shares it with all the students. This gives the students and professor a single place to go in Google Docs to access and manage all of their course files.

A collection is a Google Docs resource that contains other resources, typically behaving like a folder on a file system.

A collection resource is created by making an HTTP POST to the feed link with the category element’s term set to http://schemas.google.com/docs/2007#folder, for example:

<?xml version=1.0 encoding=UTF-8?>
<entry xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <category scheme="http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#kind"
      term="http://schemas.google.com/docs/2007#folder"/>
  <title>Example Collection</title>
</entry>

To achieve the same thing using the Python client library, use the following code:

from gdata.docs.data import Resource

collection = Resource(folder)
collection.title.text = Example Collection

# client is an Authorized client
collection = client.create_resource(entry)

The new collection returned has a content element indicating the URL to use to add new resources to the collection. Resources are added by making HTTP POST requests to this URL.

<content 
  src="https://docs.google.com/feeds/default/private/full/folder%3A134acd/contents"
  type="application/atom+xml;type=feed" />

This process is simplified in the client libraries. For example, in the Python client library, resources can be added to the new collection by passing the collection into the create_resource method for creating resources, or the move_resource method for moving an existing resource into the collection, like so:

# Create a new resource of document type in the collection
new_resource = Resource(type=document, title=New Document)
       client.create_resource(new_resource, collection=collection)

# Move an existing resource
client.move_resource(existing_resource, collection=collection)

Once resources have been added to the collection, the collection can be shared using ACL entries. For example, to add the user user@example.com as a writer to the collection and every resource in the collection, the client creates and adds the ACL entry like so:

from gdata.acl.data import AclScope, AclRole
from gdata.docs.data import AclEntry

acl = AclEntry(
    scope = AclScope(value=user@example.com, type=user),
    role = AclRole(value=writer)
)

client.add_acl_entry(collection, acl)

The collection and its contents are now shared, and this can be verified in the Google Docs user interface:

Note: if the application is adding more than one ACL entry, it is recommended to use batching to combine multiple ACL entries into a single request. For more information on this best practice, see the latest blog post on the topic.

The examples shown here are using the raw protocol or the Python client library. The Java client library also supports managing and sharing collections.

For more information on how to use collections, see the Google Documents List API documentation. You can also find assistance in the Google Documents List API forum.

Ali Afshar profile | twitter Ali is a Developer Programs engineer at Google, working on Google Docs and the Shopping APIs which help shopping-based applications upload and search shopping content. As an eternal open source advocate, he contributes to a number of open source applications, and is the author of the PIDA Python IDE. Once an intensive care physician, he has a special interest in all aspects of technology for healthcare.

• Agile isnt necessary when you have a known problem and a known solution.
• Agile doesnt work in regulated environments.
• Agile doesnt work in government.
• Agile cant work in a large enterprise.
• etc.

Does the team want to use agile and have the support to do it?

• 57% of respondents to one study described their e-learning experience as "frustrating, lonely, and stressful;"
• The best e-learning environment (which includes audio and visual techniques) yields only about 40% retention of the material covered;
• Humans, by nature, learn best through social interaction - a critical element removed by e-learning;
• Much of e-learning course material is simply live lecture material posted to the Internet, resulting in a poor learning experience in which crucial context is removed because there is no human instructor to impart it."

"As the overall online experience becomes richer and more varied with each technological advance, the debate over live training versus e-learning will continue. But at the end of the day, IT training is all about developing competency, not just completing a course or achieving certification. For any IT training participant to achieve true competency and confidence in the skills they are learning, they must take part in a program that provides extensive, hands-on lab exercises where they can practice and hone their newly-developed skills, enabling them to put these skills to immediate use upon return to the workplace. Until the day arrives that e-learning provides an equally rich, personally-interactive experience, the ability to gain true competence in IT training will remain firmly entrenched in the classroom."