A thoughtfully-designed computer system will usually guide you along once you start using it, but sometimes just logging in can be the first hurdle! You have to remember where to find/launch the system in the first place, as well as some kind of username and one or more passwords—and of course the system mustn't provide you with too many clues at this stage. Perhaps it's no surprise then that the single most common problem reported to our support team is "I can't remember how I log in".

The "proper" way to access Incerts is to browse to schools.incerts.org or cymru.incerts.org and type your initials and passwords into the Login page. However, if your school uses Google Apps there's a much easier way that you and your colleagues can log in to Incerts. This is known as Single Sign-On, and it works because our servers can communicate with Google's servers behind-the-scenes.

Google Apps is a collective name for Gmail (email system), Google Docs (document sharing), Google Sites (website builder), etc. You might already know that Google provides all these tools as a single package FREE to schools, thereby providing a simple, modular alternative to a commercial Learning Platform. If you want to know more about Google Apps, read about how Steve Philp uses it here, or get help from Mark Allen here, or go straight to the source, here. I must stop short of giving Google Apps our absolute or official recommendation because every school's needs are different, but I can say that so far I've only heard good things from the schools who are using it.

So, if you're in one of the half-a-dozen or so schools that we know are using Incerts and Google Apps together, this is for you: a two-sentence guide to setting up Single Sign-On. Somewhere within your Learning Platform or School Website, create a link to https://login.incerts.org/?school=NNN&domain=DOMAIN where NNN is the three digits on the end of your school password and DOMAIN is your Google Apps domain, "something.com" or similar. Then, go to the Edit Teachers page on Incerts and provide the Google Apps email address of each teacher. That's it. When anyone clicks the link, Incerts and Google servers will talk to each other, and if that person has already logged in to any of your Google tools they won't need to provide any further passwords to get into Incerts.

The integration between Incerts and Google Apps goes much further than this: get in touch to find out how to share Incerts reports and data via Google Docs, for example.