Partnering with Google?

kelchenk · #1

Hello all,

I heard that the Church has partnered with Google (to some degree) in the development of Church software, such as using Google Calendar as the basis for the new stake/ward calendar.

Is this true?

Thanks much in advance.

Note: Apologies to the person who responded to the first version of this thread, which has gone missing! Thanks for your reply.

aebrown · #2

Here's the missing response (we had some technical difficulties with the earlier thread, so it's no longer available, but I am able to reproduce the post):

mfmohlma wrote:Welcome to the forum. It's definitely not true for the calendar. Some poking around the calendar subforum will give you a sense of what's been on the developers' plates for a while. The maps application does use Google for one of the display options, but that's not terribly surprising. That's the only thing that I can see as a "regular" user.

russellhltn · #3

I understand the Church has been using GMail for some of it's systems. Such as the one used by the Missionaries.

kelchenk · #4

aebrown wrote:Here's the missing response (we had some technical difficulties with the earlier thread, so it's no longer available, but I am able to reproduce the post):

Thanks so much for providing that--it is definitely appreciated!

RussellHltn wrote:I understand the Church has been using GMail for some of it's systems. Such as the one used by the Missionaries.

Yes, I forgot that Gmail was mentioned as well by the person that I talked to.

aebrown · #5

kelchenk wrote:Yes, I forgot that Gmail was mentioned as well by the person that I talked to.

Both new.ldsmail.net (used by stake presidents, mission presidents, and other leaders) and myldsmail.net (used by full-time missionaries) are built on the mail system that is part of Google Apps. I don't know that I'd describe that as "partnering with Google" -- lots of companies choose to use Google Apps to run their mail systems; that's simply a product offering from Google that the Church has chosen to use.

jdcr256 · #6

As aebrown stated, some of the church mail systems use Google Apps, but there is no 'partnering' going on.

As for the calendar (which I work on), we wish there was partnering with Google. They probably have an order of magnitude (or more) more resources on their calendar than we do on ours.

Though we did try hard to contact Google when we were having problems with the Google sync feature, I can confirm that we have had no collaboration at all with them.

kelchenk · #7

jdcr256 wrote:As aebrown stated, some of the church mail systems use Google Apps, but there is no 'partnering' going on.

As for the calendar (which I work on), we wish there was partnering with Google. They probably have an order of magnitude (or more) more resources on their calendar than we do on ours.

Though we did try hard to contact Google when we were having problems with the Google sync feature, I can confirm that we have had no collaboration at all with them.

Thanks for taking the time to clear things up, guys!