Google announces Sites – Google SharePoint?

I would have to say that Microsoft SharePoint could be considered the foundation of the product I work on at Microsoft, PerformancePoint Server 2007.

That being the case, I try to keep myself very aware of what’s going on in that space. Last night I got an email from Google advertising a new service that was available to me as a Google Apps customer. The Announcement read…

Greetings admins!

Today, we’re excited to announce the introduction of Google Sites as part of Google Apps.

Google Sites makes creating a team web site as easy as editing a document. You can quickly gather a variety of information in one place — including videos, calendars, presentations, attachments, and gadgets — and easily share it for viewing or editing with a small group, your entire organization, or the world.
As of today, Google Sites is enabled for philoking.com, which means your users can get started immediately. To help you announce this new offering to your users, we’ve included a template message below that you’re welcome to use.

It didn’t take long to realize that sounded a whole lot like SharePoint. Now Google has already been trying to take on Microsoft Office with cloud services like Google Docs, and to be honest it’s a pretty impressive product given the complexity of having an entirely web based spreadsheet solution.

So what does this new service offer exactly? Well I took some time to play with it and some of the highlights are as follows…

Google has 5 page types for your sites:

• Web Page allows you to create basic static content, you can format it with the basic Bold, Italic, Underline, Font Color options, define tables, insert links, images, Google Docs, Picasa slideshows, Gadgets, video and more.
• Dashboard allows you to create something similar to iGoogle on a page within the site, useful for a landing page, news, etc.
• Announcements duplicates the formatting function of Web Page, but adds in the ability to date thread them so you can use it like a calendar of sorts. Oddly enough I see no integration with Google Calendar which seems like a common sense fusion.
• File Cabinet is a file repository complete with subscription capability and commenting. I looked through the help and could find no documentation on file size limitations, for uploading or total storage.
• List is very much like SharePoint. You have 3 standard templates for Action Items, Issues and Unit Status, as well as attachments and comments, and a free form “Create Your Own” list feature which allows you to create a totally custom layout. Missing from this seems to be any raw url to access the list or any API to expose it as a data source of any kind.

The site itself is quite customizable, and in cases of cross geo teams who need to collaborate, even with actual Office documents, I can see it as a real competitor. The place it falls short, which is the majority of SharePoint installs in my opinion, is extensability.

There appears to be no actual API, no way to access web services to extend it with additional functionality and most importantly no way to use it as a data source for any other tools or products. I am sure that this is clearly on the Radar as this is only a beta and will probably continue to grow.

I did see a few performance issues and when testing it with Google Docs integration I saw some problems with formatting spreadsheets, especially with charts into your pages.

The bottom line is that this is one impressive piece of web coding. Cross browser it’s beautiful, the feature set is incredibly rich for a free product. The question I ask is:

How many are going to trust Google and “the cloud” with their data 100%. If you place your life in a site and it dies, the service is discontinued or whatever disaster you can dream up, having no access to the data and no traditional way to back it up or export it to another tool, that’s a pretty scary proposition.

If you would like to view my test site, you can access it here http://sites.google.com/a/philoking.com/testsite/lkists

If you would like to play with it, send me your Google ID and I will set you up access to modify it.

My co-worker found a scary little footnote:

Content you create with Google Sites may, if you choose, be read, copied, used and redistributed by people you know or, again if you choose, by people you do not know. Use care when including sensitive personal information in content you share, such as social security numbers, financial account information, home addresses or phone numbers.

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