After waiting expectantly for the release of Google Sites, the successor to Jotspot, for more than a year, I must confess I'm pretty disappointed in the result. The user interface is clunky and non-intuitive and offers little new in the way of collaborative tools, other than Joomla-esq shared web page editing.What happened? Google already has a terrific widget enabled web page creation tool. It's called Blogger! Why didn't they use that technology to make dropping various functional elements onto a page easy?
The ability to quickly create an Intranet/Xtranet of four to twenty pages is what most of my SMB clients are looking for. Doing this with SharePoint has always been too developer and infrastructure intensive, leaving us to
recommend products like WebOffice (formerly Intranets.com) and Blue Tie as web-based collaboration tools.BlueTie in unique in that it offers unique ways for partners to monetize the solution and generate a unique ongoing revenue stream. In fact, BlueTie was recently recognized as an OnMedia Top 100 Winner.
Google has missed the mark badly with its Google Sites application. It's unfortunate, because it takes the pressure off Microsoft to improve SharePoint's ease of use and Cisco to lower the cost of WebOffice.
Until Google releases a Google Sites application that is significantly easier to use and functional, I will continue to recommend WebOffice, Blue Tie or our own TeamPro application as a Intranet/Xtranet solution.
