Google Launches Sites for Google Apps! R.I.P. SharePoint?

Google Sites (Wiki / JotSpot resurrection) is now part of Google Apps! This makes Google Apps an even more powerful and valuable set of tools. Now anyone can build dynamic websites and collaborate on them in real-time! This really makes Google Apps a “Sharepoint” killer. The amount of licensing fees, infrastructure requirements, hosting fees, just overall management and administration it requires to run SharePoint is overwhelming – even for an IT company like SADA. So this is definitely going to be one of those tools we use!

Official announcement below:

https://sites.google.com/

Google Apps that makes creating a team web site as easy as editing a document. With Google Sites, people can quickly gather a variety of information in one place — including videos, calendars, presentations, attachments, and text — and easily share it for viewing or editing with a small group, their entire organization, or the world.

Google Sites is the new version of JotSpot, which was acquired by Google in late 2006. As a former JotSpotter, it’s particularly gratifying to see our wiki-based collaboration product surface on Google.com.

Some key product features from https://gsuite.google.com/learning-center/products/sites/:

– Customize your site’s interface to resemble your group or project’s look and feel

– Create a new sub-page with the click of a button and edit the page with a WYSIWYG editor

– Choose from a growing list of page types: webpage, announcements, file cabinet, dashboard and list

– Centralize shared information: Embed rich content (video, Google Docs documents, spreadsheets, presentations, Picasa photo slide shows, iGoogle gadgets) into any page, and upload file attachments

– Manage permissions settings to keep your site as privately or widely editable and viewable as you’d like

– Search across your Google Sites content with Google search technology

See also the Sites Help Center page: https://www.google.com/support/a/bin/topic.py?topic=14075