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Google takes aim at Microsoft's SharePoint
Website creation tool for workers launched

By Reuters

Published: Thursday 28 February 2008

Google has said it is offering a simple website-publishing tool for office workers to set up and run their team-collaboration sites, taking aim at Microsoft's rival SharePoint franchise.

Google Sites, as the new site publishing service is known, is a scaled back version of JotSpot, an easy-to-edit service for organisations and individuals to set up and edit websites, which Google acquired 16 months ago for undisclosed terms.

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The new service, the latest stage in the internet leader's push into the market for business and educational users, allows non-technical users to organise and share digital information such as web links, calendars, photos, videos, presentations, attachments and other documents in an easy-to-maintain site.

Dave Girouard, general manager of Google's enterprise unit, said: "Creating a team website has always been too complicated, requiring dedicated hardware and software, as well as programming skills."

Google Sites is a stripped-down rival to Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration software, which lets users inside an organisation share documents and maintain calendars on secure websites but is far more complex to set up and maintain.

Unlike SharePoint, which typically requires organisations to buy and maintain their own hardware and software at costs that can run from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars to serve 100 users, Google Sites is hosted on Google computers and is free to users of Google Apps, which the company offers at a fraction of the cost of Microsoft tools.

Girouard said: "We think this is SharePoint-like - but better."

Basic sites are free or carry a small monthly per-user fee, depending on whether organisations have purchased fuller-featured versions of Google Apps that allow for centralised technical management.

Google Sites puts control of websites into the hands of normal office workers rather than an organisation's network administrators or technical support desk, Girouard said.

He said: "The idea is that IT doesn't have to do anything except enable users to serve themselves."

Google Sites enables any user invited to join a site to edit pages without requiring knowledge of web coding or design. Any information published to the site is searchable by visitors with permission to use the site, the company said.

The site publishing framework lets office workers create intranets. Such sites can be used to manage team projects.

Girouard said he considered Google Sites the biggest new product introduction in a steady stream of innovations since his company introduced Google Apps only a year ago this month.

Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst with technical consulting firm Nucleus Research, said: "Google Sites is relatively easy to use and free. Google is making people think differently about how businesses use the web."

But Wettemann said Google's website publishing framework so far lacks management features that let organisations control the unbridled proliferation of poorly maintained or out-of-date websites that can occur when such tools are let loose.

Wettemannn said: "Just because it is easy to use and intuitive doesn't mean users don't have to sit down and think about the business problems they are trying to solve."