Google Sites LaunchedI played with it on my MN Special Hockey Google Apps domain.
Google finally launched a service that uses JotSpot's technology: Google Sites. The new service is a part of Google Apps and allows you to create web sites collaboratively. 'People can work together on a Site to add file attachments, information from other Google applications (like Google Docs, Google Calendar, YouTube and Picasa), and new free-form content. Creating a site together is as easy as editing a document, and you always control who has access, whether it's just yourself, your team, or your whole organization,' explains Google.
Google offers templates, a rich-text editor, 10GB of storage for each Google Apps account and integration with other Google services so you can embed gadgets, calendars, spreadsheets, presentations, photo slideshows and videos. You can invite people to collaborate or just view a site and you can also publish the site so that anyone can view it.
Some quick impressions:
- The basics are very similar to Page Creator (PC), but it has more facilities for collaboration and change tracking. There are more and better editing tools. It's Wiki-influenced but it feels more like a web page authoring environment than a Wiki. I think you can use it for both.
- I didn't see that file management (attachments) was any better than PC. I hope I'm missing something. File management in PC is awful.
- It appears to support Safari, PC doesn't.
- Like PC you can have multiple sites per domain but you have much more control over access and what becomes public.
- I haven't figured out the Documents integration yet, not sure it's that well integrated.
I think for most sites it will replace Page Creator. There's no migration yet from existing Page Creator sites however, so today you'd have to recreate all PC work in Google Sites. I hope Google will provide some guidance eventually, I won't be moving anything yet.
I'm glad to see a replacement coming from PC, so this one's good news.
Nice blog post. For Google Docs integration, just create a new web page (or dashboard) and hit the Insert button on the toolbar. You can insert Calendars, Picasa slideshow, Google Docs, Videos, and even Google Gadgets from iGoogle.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the helpful write-up!
ReplyDeleteTV,
ReplyDeleteWhat I need is the ability to link to PDFs and other file types that aren't part of Google Docs -- including documents, presetnations, zip files, etc.
So what I really want is GoogleDisk integration with Google Sites.
I'm so desperate for GoogleDisk that I delude myself into thinking that the lack of file management facilities in GS is a sign than GoogleDisk is finally on the way.
This write up was informative and well thought-out. It helped me understand what I can expect or not expect in using Google Sites.
ReplyDeleteThanks -- I was trying to figure out the difference and this did it for me.
ReplyDeleteA big difference between pc and sites is that you can't have adsense ads in sites as yet.
ReplyDeleteI really like google sites, but it really bugs me that it doesn't support java script and different types of html. I hope they will do something about that.
ReplyDelete