Google sets its Sites on Microsoft

GOOGLE SITES, which launched today, is basically an online Intranet, for creating team collaborations.

Google reckons its new launch will help to "collectivize" information in the from of documents, videos, photos, calendars, task lists and attachments.

Its focus as a business tool sets it up as a major competitor to Microsoft's Sharepoint, which is the subject of a Microsoft conference in Seattle in a just a few of days and through which the shockwaves from this announcement are designed to reverberate.

Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager of Google Enterprise, described the new addition to Google Apps as, "adding an edit button to the web".

As far as features are concerned, Google Sites allows users to plug into applications like Picassa images and enables embedding relevant (presumably work related) videos from YouTube onto a shared dashboard. Users can search Google using the Google search tool and groups can be restricted by personal invitation or by email domain. It's free, doesn't require any installation, and therefore doesn't require maintenance or any upgrades.

Microsoft's chief financial officer, Christopher Liddell, recently told the New York Times that SharePoint had become a $1 billion a year product, which, considering that Microsoft's business division brought in $4.8 billion in the last quarter, is not entirely insignificant either.

Google Sites is based on technology developed by the start-up JotSpot, co-founded by Joe Kraus, who also co-founded the now obsolete web portal, Excite. Google acquired Jotspot, which had developed a set of "wiki" tools, and had customers which included Intel, Symantec and eBay, in October 2006.

This seems to be where most of the criticism leveled at Google Sites stems from, with people like Alastair Mitchell, CEO of online collaboration and project management site Huddle.net, asking why the world needs yet another W iki.

Google Sites hasn't got him and his pals "peeing their pants yet," he said.

Link: Google Sites

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