Improving Revevol’s Productivity with Google Apps Script

Repost from Google Enterprise Blog

Editor’s Note: Guest authors Lynn Jaber and Romain Vialard work at Revevol, the first international service provider dedicated to Google Apps. Each day, they imagine new ways to improve their business processes with Google technology!

At Revevol, we train clients’ employees who have just migrated to Google Apps, to help them get the most out of their new system. The more Revevol grows, the more customer trainings we have to handle, so we need to quickly find available trainers depending on parameters like the training date, language, location of trainers and trainer skills.

Google Apps Script, a cloud scripting language based on JavaScript, is wired into almost every Google product, so it’s a perfect solution for checking calendars and spreadsheets, and solving our scheduling problems. In the early days, we were using a simple Google Form. It was really easy to put together and simple to use, but one thing was missing: the form just collected data -- there was no way it could automatically take action based on information submitted. Someone had to manually process the information.

This is where Apps Script came to the rescue -- with a little JavaScript code we could build an interactive form that we so badly needed. In a single day, Apps Script let us build a shiny new graphical user interface for our tool, which lets let us dynamically search for available trainers across all skill levels and categories.

How did we do it? We recreated our form using Ui Services in Apps Script. We added a panel next to the form, to show the search results of trainers that match our queries. By using Spreadsheet Services in Apps Script, we could search and fetch data from a spreadsheet that serves as our database of trainers. We also added the ability to sort the search results of trainers by skill level and distance from the training location.

Thanks to integration with Google Maps Services in Apps Script, we're even able to display a map to help our project managers find the closest trainer. Project managers can select more than one trainer from search results and each selected trainer will receive a calendar invitation. The first to respond “Yes” gets the training assignment. It was incredibly easy to build and deploy this application. In one click, we published it so anyone at Revevol can access the tool in their browsers. Apps Script helped us automate this tedious business process!

Posted by Romain Vialard and Lynn Jaber, Revevol