Google Sites

There has been a lot of buzz around Google Sites recently. Naturally, I decided to feel what it is by touch.

While I respect Google’s desire to position the service as the SharePoint killer, let’s say there is a gap between them the size of Grand Canyon and move on.

Below are my thoughts on where the service is realistically positioned in terms of market segment and competition and what might be useful additions to it.

It took Google solid 16 months to turn one of the best wiki services around - JotSpot - into… a good wiki service. Google Sites’ idea of collaboration revolves around the wiki concept. The incumbents here, in the enterprise play, are Socialtext, Jive Software’s Clearspace X, and PBWiki. I can imagine Google having hard time to displace any of these based on its current offering.

How might Google better its offering then?

If you look at Sites’ page templates you’ll see list templates like Issue List and Unit Status. These are supposed to be used for bug tracking and project management, respectively. I’m not gonna laugh at it as I saw things done this way even in the enterprise on a few occasions. However, under most circumstances the project teams want to use some sort of specialized tool for either task and this is where Google Sites improvement potential lies.

SugarCRM comes to mind as the first candidate for integration into Google Apps family, be it the acquisition way or otherwise. This will cover both holes mentioned above and provide a host of enterprise-relevant features on top of that.

Basecamp provides an outstanding project management service. Integrating it, or interacting with it, will be highly beneficial.

There are other conceivable integration options ranging from Mantis bug tracking system to Drupal CMS.

The corollary… Google should create or improve, by either developing in-house or acquiring, specialized collaboration components to make Google Apps (and Google Sites, the integration hub of it) relevant in the enterprise.