Google Training with Nick Fraser

Contributed by John Sieka

The administration and staff of the New African Technology Company benefited from a one day training seminar yesterday at its office situated on Randall Street just above the Master Trading Center in Monrovia. Our guest lecturer was Mr. Nick Fraser from England.

Search

We learned about how Google search engine works. Mr. Fraser further explained the origin of the search engine and the origin of the word “Google” and its meaning. Google revolutionised search on the Internet where before, it was difficult to actually get what one was looking for. 

Documents

For Documents, which is sometimes called Google Docs for short, we learned how a word processing document or excel spread sheet can be created and use simultaneously by different users in one geographical location and in different location around the world using Google docs. A document when created in google doc can be made to have permission rights and privileges. We even learn that there are options for a user or creator of a document to choose who view, who edit, and what they are allow to edit. Working with google doc, a particular document when created in can be view to by whoever the creator wants to view the document. The administration of NATC has even plan to use google doc so the one staff can see, edit or take part in what that the other working on.

Google Maps

Google map has already being incorporated by the technical department of NATC. It will aid technicians during site surveys of wide area network (WAN) to give the actual distance between two sites, or the distance from a outdoor router or meraki that a user can be to still have access his network. Google map is a feature of Gmail that enable a person to pin point a particular place, city, county, country, street, or even a particular building on a particular street. It also calculates distances and coordinates. With Google map, it is also possible to see the map of a particular place. Google map is also interesting in that it can helps in finding streets, cities, countries, and gives clue of how those places look like before you even get there.

Google Groups

A Google group is a collection of people with the same idea, skill set, professions, etc. We learn of two prominent Google groups in Liberia; namely: “Liberia Expats” and “Liberia IT.” Being a member of a google group can be so interesting and exciting in that, you find people of your same skill set, belief, religion, etc in one place where one can post, make comments, share ideas and so on.

Google Reader

Google reader is an exciting features in Gmail that enables you to place all of you frequent visit site in one collection in order to avoid you having to go to individual site all the time to access the same things daily. Google reader will allow you to gather all those sites through RSS feeds and place them in one collection and have you inform whenever there is a change on either of the site. Mr. Fraser demonstrated this on his laptop too.

Google Calendar

Enables you to organize your entire daily, monthly, and even yearly events .This feature of Gmail is also going to be incorporated into the technical department of the New Africa Technology Company. It will help them organize the entire maintenance schedule of their client so that they don’t miss out on them. This feature will also be synchronize with google alert so that an e-mail will be sent to all members of the technical department at least three day ahead of time to remind them of a pending maintenance.

Alerts

This serves as a reminder to a daily task. Once configure, it will remind you of a friend wedding, celebration, birthday, or some daily task, etc. it has ability to even send you email to remind you of upcoming events. A text message can even be sent to your phone if you have google on your phone.

It was so amazing the all these features of Gmail could be learned in one just one and some of which are being incorporated into New African Technology Company to aid the staff in their daily operations. Interestingly, there are still other features of Gmail that were not discussed in the seminar. Some of those are: 1. Google Chrome 2.Google desktop 3. Google Dictionary 4. Google health 5. Google earth. 6. iGoogle 7. Google Toolbar 8. Google Finance 9. Google books etc….. These features of Google that were not talk about were discovered after I personally tried to explore google.

It will be of great interest for you to make further research on them. It is an exciting new world of adventures!