Google Apps Integration

Would be nice to get some feedback on this topic as I am looking into it to.

There is going to be a lot here and I tend to ramble and go off on tangents...

The primary module I see for GoogleApps integration so far is DrupalGapps. I haven't tried it myself, but from what I see, it looks like the developer was able to get Drupal users associated with Google Apps, including registration. I believe passwords are still not synched, but I'd have to check. I know there was a screenshot saying "Here are your site credentials and here are your Google Apps credentials" The developer also had screenshot somewhere of some custom blocks he'd done to create lists of recent documents, new mail messages, and upcoming events.

My goal, and what I think a lot of others would like to see, is that capability to be created for users and then available for use on a dashboard like the one on OpenAtrium or Drupal Commons.

I've also done some very early PoC work on Gmail gadgets in general. Overall, it looks relatively easy to create a simple one. The difficult part would be adding in the services calls. Mainly, there would need to be calls to node.save for things like creating new contacts, projects, tasks, etc, and calls to views.get while passing the email of the sender as an argument to retrieve a list of recent invoices, tasks, projects, what have you.

Since Gmail gadgets are essentially governed by two XML files, one being the manifest.xml and the other the spec.xml, I think these can be generated by a module. The manifest.xml is just copied into Google when you create your app, so the module could generate that code similar to how Boost generates the code for you to put in the .htaccess file. spec.xml could simply have a path defined for it and then the module would return whatever code is deemed available by the site admin.

For instance, if you want to list tasks and not projects, you simply uncheck projects and that they are no longer returned in the generated spec.xml.

As there is no direct link to Storm since this is going through Views, the Gmail gadget could be a completely separate, flexible project where you are just identifying the data to display based on a view and what arguments are passed to it. As such, it'd be just as easy to build a view that accepts the email of users on the site as opposed to contacts. You could also specify something like listing the definition for any taxonomy terms used in the email body below the email (in theory).

I guess when it comes down to it, this ideally is three separate projects. One to integrate Google Apps users with Drupal users (appears resolved in DrupalGapps), one to incorporate the upcoming events, recent docs, and unread messages blocks for using in Panels or Dashboards, and finally one to create a Gmail Gadget that returns and creates content based on user actions in Gmail.

Thanks,

James