Last week’s announcement of Google’s release of Google Sites reminds me of a modern day Hatfield vs McCoy feud except (I hope) without all the bloodshed. Just a few months ago, Microsoft took a shot using their purchase of FAST. In the latest segment, Google fires off Google Sites to unseat Microsoft SharePoint 2007?

Google Sites allows user groups to easily create Web documents that include text, images, videos, spreadsheets and other types of documents. So does Microsoft SharePoint. The key difference other than SharePoint’s long list of features, Google Sites sits outside of the corporate firewall.

A member of the Google Apps family, Google is hoping that company groups and departments will adopt Google Sites as their collaborate tool.  On the product web site, Google uses five examples, three geared toward the enterprise--Company Intranet, Team project, and Employee profile.

In an interview with Techcrunch’s Mike Arringhton, Google’s Management Director of Enterprise Matthew Glotzbach called the combined products under Google Apps a "Microsoft Sharepoint killer" because it’s allowing businesses to collaborate without all that expensive Microsoft software.

In my opinion, that might be slightly premature.

First, the features of Google Sites is limited compared to SharePoint. Additionally, corporations and their IT administrators are very finicky when it comes to letting company information live on servers outside of the firewall. Especially in large corporations, it rarely happens. Heck, I worked for a couple of corporations that won’t let you go to many popular web sites not even Gmail or Yahoo! mail.

For very small organizations, Google Sites might be the right application. But I think its more accurate that Google Sites is a competitor to Zoho, PBwiki, Confluence, SocialText, or Blogtronix. Over time that may change, just not today.

Around the Blogsphere

Dennis Howlette of Irregular Enterprise and Zdnet fame has two good posts here and here.

Posted by Marvin Pyles on 02/29  •  Add to My Favorites •  Email Entry
Blogs, Collaboration, Social Networking, Wikis • ECM, WCM, Portals • Open Source, SaaS •  Comments (0) • Permalink 
 
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