Google has finally found a way to incorporate the collaborative website editing tools the company acquired over a year ago when it purchased JotSpot. The result, dubbed Google Sites, is part of the Google Apps suite and offers most, though not all, of the features found in the popular JotSpot.
The new Google Sites tool is designed to make it easy for anyone to create, edit and invite collaborators to help build a website — Google Sites seems aimed at anything from corporate intranets to school classroom pages to small project collaborations.
As with all things Google, Sites is clearly positioned to compete with a Microsoft product, in this case Sharepoint (or something like IBM's Lotus Notes). Although Google Sites is doesn't compete with Sharepoint directly in terms of features, it definitely trumps it in ease-of-use.
Setting up a new website in Google Sites is just a matter of clicking a button and choosing a default page look. From there you can set up the site however you like — control who can view it, who can edit it and more.
Google Sites provides a set of page templates (five different pages at the moment), a rich-text editor, 10GB of storage per account and of course integration with other Google services which makes it easy to embed things like Google gadgets, calendars, spreadsheets, presentations, slideshows and videos directly into your pages.
Thankfully Google Sites eschews the markup languages common to most wikis and just offers a rich text editor, which you can use just like the word processor in Google Docs (there's also an option to edit the HTML source directly).
Still, other hints of JotSpot's wiki past are in evidence (and that's a good thing). A Google Sites page records all the editing changes anyone makes and you can see who made changes, un-do those changes or just get alerted when changes are made — all standard wiki features.
Google Sites also allows you to control who can see your pages, whether it's just you, a select group you invite or the world at large.
As with most Google Apps offerings, the initial launch is light on the features and focuses instead on the simplicity and sharing aspects of Google Sites. In many respects this is a step backwards from the old JotSpot, which featured an API and many more options, but as with Writely and other Google acquisitions, the power user features will likely come in future releases.
[via Google Operating System]
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