Google has relaunched their JotSpots acquisition as Google Sites, Google is framing it as a collaborative website / portal tool, something “bigger than a wiki.”
With the elimination of the twee terminology, what remains is an application for quickly and easily designing group-editable Web sites. Google Sites users can put up Web sites in minutes and can, without any advanced technical skills, post a variety of files including calendars, text, spreadsheets, and videos for private, group, or public viewing and editing.
Google Sites won’t please demanding Web designers. There’s no way to add CSS style sheets and the existing design templates are functional but not elegant. Then again, the pleasantly bland aesthetic options protect against the deployment of sites that actually inhibit productivity as a result of their hideousness.
The standard free version provides 10Gb of storage; more professional accounts add more storage.
Google Sites isn’t simply a free service for consumers; it’s also angling for enterprise adoption, particularly among Microsoft SharePoint users. “On the enterprise side, it’s very interesting timing,” said Jim Murphy, research director, AMR Research, noting that Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s first SharePoint conference begins next week.
Murphy expects companies will weigh Google Sites against SharePoint and that Google may win some customers who are looking for a hosted solution. “SharePoint so far has just been offered as on-premises software,” he said. “For some companies, it’s hard to make investments in that kind of infrastructure.”
I could see something like this being very popular for other personal collaboration activities — gaming campaigns, vacation/event planning, etc.
Pretty sweet! I’m configuring this stuff for my domain as we speak.
Good to hear. I expect, like any first release from Google, it will be a bit rough — but I also expect it will be powerful and popular.
WOW! If this gives you any indication of how awesome Google Sites is… our institution just paid $4500 for a MAC server that is going to do many different things. Wikis is one thing and our IT shop has tried many different wiki sites and MAC was the only good one. I can truly say that Google Sites is just as good for free as the money spent on a license for Leopard Server.
Cool — good to hear.