A few new features popped up with our UMN Google Apps accounts this week:
(1) Appointment Slots
This is a feature that was probably designed for instructor office hours and hair salons. You can now share portions of your calendar to allow people to create an appointment on your calendar between specified hours. As an example, I've set up an appointments calendar for UThink: https://www.google.com/calendar/selfsched?sstoken=UUU5aE9QN0xIMnV1fGRlZmF1bHR8NDE3ZWU0ZjkzZTg3NTkwYTY5YzJmMmFhMmU5ZDVjNWI
More information on Appointment Slots.
(2) Default meeting length
You can now set your default meeting length in your calendar settings:
(3) Calendar printing : select a date range
I think this is one we can all benefit from. We can now select a date range when we're printing our calendar.
(4) Nested labels
In Gmail, you can now create multiple levels of labels, allowing you to collapse labels with +/-, almost like sub-folders. As neat as this is for keeping your list of labels tidy, I've found a couple shortcomings:
(a) Sub-labels can't be hidden without hiding the parent label and all of its "sibling" labels.
(b) If you give a conversation a sub-label, it's not implied that it should also be given the parent label. To illustrate this point, here's my example. I have a parent label called "PSE" and a sub-label called "Janice". Suppose I got an email from Janice, and I labeled it "Janice". If I click on the "PSE" label in my list, I won't see that one that I labeled "Janice". Weird, huh? I think some programmer at Google fell asleep during logic class. :) (Modus ponens, anyone?)
