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kenoodo
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Joined: 17 Jul 2005
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Location: MengDai
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 Posted: Thu Feb 28, 2008 10:04 am Post subject: Google offers team Web site publishing service |
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| Quote: | By Eric Auchard
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc said on Wednesday it is offering a simple Web site publishing tool for office workers to set up and run their team collaboration sites, taking aim at Microsoft Corp'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 organizations and individuals to set up and edit Web sites that Google had acquired 16 months ago for undisclosed terms.
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 organize and share digital information such as Web links, calendars, photos, videos, presentations, attachments and other documents in an easy-to-maintain site.
"Creating a team web site has always been too complicated, requiring dedicated hardware and software as well as programming skills," said Dave Girouard, general manager of Google's Enterprise unit, which is aimed at office workers.
Google Sites is a stripped-down version of Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration software, which lets users inside an organization share documents and maintain calendars on secure Web sites, but is far more complex to set up and maintain.
Unlike SharePoint, which typically requires organizations to buy and maintain their own hardware and software at costs that can run from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to serve one hundred 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.
"We think this is SharePoint-like, but better," Girouard said in an interview.
Basic sites are free or carry a small monthly per-user fee, depending on whether organizations have purchased fuller-featured versions of Google Apps that allow for centralized technical management.
Google Sites puts control of Web sites into the hands of regular office workers rather than an organization's network administrators or technical support desk, Girouard said.
"The idea is that IT (Information Technology departments) don't have to do anything except enable users to serve themselves," the Google executive said.
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" -- centralized archives of company information that can only be viewed within an organization rather than on the public Web. Such sites can be used to manage team projects.
Individual teams members can also create profile pages of their activities, interests and schedules. In school settings, Google Sites can function as virtual classrooms for posting homework assignments, class notes or other student resources.
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.
Google Apps offers a suite of word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation software that let groups of users edit and view documents over the Web, together with e-mail and basic personal Web site publishing tools.
Over the past year, Google said more than 500,000 businesses and several thousand schools and universities have adopted Google Apps.
"Google Sites is relatively easy to use and free," said Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst with technical consulting firm Nucleus Research of Wellesley, Massachusetts. "Google is making people think differently about how businesses use the Web."
But Wettemannn said Google's Web site publishing framework so far lacks management features that let organizations control the unbridled proliferation of poorly maintained or out-of-date Web sites that can occur when such tools are let loose.
"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," she said.
(Editing by Kim Coghill)
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This time Google is going to put Google Sites online. Maybe next time, it would be free hosting. Who knows what would be the next. I have no idea why Google always gives us so many surprises. Maybe because they have earn too much money and need to spend more and more for the whole world in their own way.
I wan to say we are lucky to have Google. It is special and I will be always expecting for new gadgets coming from the Google group. But I also worried about Google, they are putting their hands in so many fields, could it be possible that would drag the whole Google down? |
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leontius
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Joined: 26 Mar 2008
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| Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2008 5:02 am Post subject: |
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There is already a service named Google Pages that sounds like free web hosting, but you are limited to what Google has to offer (design, script, functionality etc).
But a real free web hosting is much harder to maintain - they need to host Apache, MySQL, PHP... and maintain them all. The service will become very popular if it exists, mainly because you will have a very excellent service because it comes from Google.
I don't think the whole Google won't drag down - they have too many smart employees that don't do lots of things.
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ClickFanatic
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linuxdoctor
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Joined: 23 Apr 2005
Posts: 1203
Location: Ottawa, Canada
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| Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2008 7:53 am Post subject: |
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| leontius wrote: |
But a real free web hosting is much harder to maintain - they need to host Apache, MySQL, PHP... and maintain them all. The service will become very popular if it exists, mainly because you will have a very excellent service because it comes from Google.
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All the Google services run under Linux and use MySQL and PHP already. Apache comes bundled with every Linux distro. For a full hosting service they may have to also offer PostgreSQL but maybe not. It also has the advantage that most of what Google offers is also all Open Source software/
The only other thing that some people may think they need is a Front Page compatibile module that allows people to run Front Page apps under Apache on Linux. It doesn't really work all that well and that is probably on purpose to keep people from migrating away from M$ hosting services. I would recommend to Google not to do that for several reasons. First, for an Open Source project like Google they should, actually, it must not use nor does it need to use closed source proprietary software. Second, it doesn't work all that well, as I said. Third, M$ apps like Front Page do not adhere to the HTML 4, or CSS1 and CSS2 standards. They have all sorts of 'extensions' which sole purpose is to work best with other M$ software and not their competitor's and does nothing that couldn't already be done probably better by adhering to the standard. Fourth, to include the Front Page module would cost Google money and M$ would make sure that it would cost them a pretty penny.
People should be encouraged to move away from M$ with all due haste. By encouraging programmers to write code that strictly adheres to the existing standards without utilising any M$ 'extensions' would be a major step forward. As an open source project itself, Google has a responsibility to encourage the Free/Open Source Software movement. It is surprising to realise that there are a large number of programmers out there who never even give it a second thought about whether their web pages work in all browsers or not. By using tools such as Front Page they are ensuring that they "work best in Microsoft Internet Explorer" and only on M$ Explorer.
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ClickFanatic
Est. 2005
Joined: 18 Jan 2005
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| Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2008 8:30 am Post subject: |
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What-you-see editors such as FrontPage, DreamWeaver or nVu are not very effective. Even if they do create valid code this is no guarantee that the site will look properly on different browsers and different resolutions.
A good code editor gives more control and, in the right hands, is usually more effective than WYSIWYG.
On-topic: Google is not really a standards advocate as far as I can tell. Most of their web software doesn't even validate.
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linuxdoctor
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Joined: 23 Apr 2005
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Location: Ottawa, Canada
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| Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2008 9:18 am Post subject: |
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| ClickFanatic wrote: | | On-topic: Google is not really a standards advocate as far as I can tell. Most of their web software doesn't even validate. |
That is sadly true. They are, however, an Open Source advocate, at least for now.
The danger with corporations is that at some point they all inevitably pull the plug on this type of freedom eventually.
The whole Free Software movement was started around 1984 when AT&T decided to assert it's copyright over Unix and start paying huge license fees for it without the benefit of the source code after fifteen years of having it freely available without charge to anyone who wanted it. The only thing you needed to pay for was a copying fee and the price of the media. Back in those days it was 9-track mag tape and cost about $100.
AT&T was the direct beneficiary of the hard work of tens of thousands of computer programmers all over the world who used Unix and created amazing applications for it for free and made it the hacker's OS. You were not a real hacker unless you could hack Unix. That still applies today. There are no Windows hackers.
I'm sure that Google will betray us the same way that every other corporate entity has betrayed the Free Software movement after getting as much out of us for free as they could.
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If you think I'm 'politically' incorrect you have the wrong politics. |
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