Solo Technology

You’ve no doubt heard by now that Google launched Google Sites recently (this morning?). Gsites is the latest offering for the Google Apps family and focuses on collaboration to complement the email and documents stuff.

From the announcement email I received this evening:

Google Sites makes creating a team web site as easy as editing a document. You can quickly gather a variety of information in one place — including videos, calendars, presentations, attachments, and gadgets — and easily share it for viewing or editing with a small group, your entire organization, or the world.

In other words, Google is in the wiki business now.  This is the [long delayed] result of Google acquisition of JotSpot last year. Finally!

Tons of other blogs are going to offer many more details and general info — I’m not going to compete. But I do want to point out a few interesting features of this latest offering that have my attention.

Page Linking/Creating

In a “normal” wiki, you can toss a few words in brackets and it becomes a link to a new and empty page (for example: [[myNewPage]]). Not so with Google Sites. No wiki links and no CamelCase auto-links. This confused me for a few minutes…

Create the page first, then go back and link the anchor word to it. That’s how you do it with Gsites. Linking is easy though: You get a list of pages to select from or you can enter the URL to an external page.

This is the one aspect of Sites that I’m not in love with so far. I really like being able to just bracket words as I type and worry about creating those child pages later. Now I have to think before I link.

Breadcrumbs and Subpages

This next bit is cool though — and helps mitigate my concerns from the previous section.

When creating a new page, you can specify the new page’s parent. By doing so, each page can optionally have a navigation area displayed below the contents (highlighted below):

That little feature will have me changing how I organize things a bit… but in a good way.

As you navigate into the sub pages, a breadcrumb trail is built at the top of the page:

In this example, the breadcrumb links show that “Alpha Server” is a child page of Servers which in turn is a child page of Home.

This should make it easy for a user to keep track of where they are and help them navigate. Page creators will be happy too; no longer having to add all the links by hand to each and every page.

Page Types

I suspect this was a JotSpot feature, but it’s new to me. When creating a new page, you can choose from several predefined types:

• Web page
• Dashboard
• Announcements
• File Cabinet
• List

Web page is about what you’d expect and to be honest, I haven’t played with most of the others — yet. But the list type. Ah, that list page is very sweet.

I like to keep logs for each server in the wiki. Wiki formatting a log is usually a bit tedious. Dunno about you, but editing tables in wiki markup is tedious. Not all that difficult once you understand the markup, but definitely a pain.

The list type makes that all so very much easier. It even adds an “Add Record” button to the page and little trash icons for each row.

Look! A pseudo database table in a wiki page.

The Date column is defined as a Date type, so it even gives a calendar date picker when entering a new record. That reboot column is defined as a checkbox with expected results as well. So simple, yet so cool.

In fact, that simple little feature was all it took for me to seriously begin porting over data from the SharePoint wiki I built earlier this month at work…

… that and the fact that it’ll do tables of contents on wiki pages. That’s something I’ve not managed to coerce out of SharePoint yet.

Thoughts?

As a one man IT show for a small/mid sized company (along with my other roles), I’ll confess that I’m a big fan of the Google Apps offerings. So far, they’re saving me time, money and giving back some shorter days. Gsites is one more that I intend to get the company using in place of some of the other wikis we have going. In most cases, it’ll work quite well for us.

Not everyone is a fan though.

How do you feel about Apps in general or the new Google sites?

3 Responses to “Google Sites - the Hosted Wiki”

1. » pingback » JotSpot Born Again as Google Sites, the Wiki-less Wiki.| Zoli’s Blog on February 29th, 2008 3:01 am
   
   
2. Phil Benwell on March 5th, 2008 5:47 am
   

   Is this the same thing as Google “Knol” which is supposed to be a direct competitor for Wikipedia.

3. Chris on March 5th, 2008 6:56 am
   

   Hi Phil. Nope, this isn’t “Knol”. This is what used to be JotSpot (www.jot.com).

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