Google Sites Gets Some New Features

From the Google Apps blog, May 19, 2009
As a website grows, organizing its content becomes ever more important. Google Sites has always allowed you to group pages in a hierarchy, but this wasn’t very apparent when finding your way around. We’ve been working on navigation, and today we’ve released a new feature that lets you set up a tree structure in your sidebar, to help show the structure of the site at a glance.

To set this up, click the “Edit Sidebar” link below the sidebar (or choose “Manage Site” from the “More Actions” menu), then edit the navigation widget. The configuration panel now lets you indent and “outdent” items to set up a hierarchy. The navigation widget can also be set up to highlight the current page, to help viewers see where they are, via a new “Navigation Current Page” color setting in the site’s “Colors and Fonts” configuration.

By grouping sub-pages in categories you can give viewers a more detailed view of your site while keeping the overall framework simple. By default only the top-level items will be expanded, as shown in the example above. A user can of course expand and collapse any items s/he wants, and those changes will be remembered across all the pages in the site.

We have many more improvements to site navigation in development; look for them in the coming months.

But that’s not the only user-interface change. We’ve also changed the toolbar to more closely resemble Google Docs, in our continuing efforts to make our applications have a more uniform look and feel. Additionally, we switched the site settings area to use vertical navigation, to make room for some upcoming features like AdSense integration. We’ve also started to add some collaborator tools to the site management area.

Less visibly, we made some major changes to our rendering infrastructure to improve performance and in preparation for new upcoming themes. This is meant to remain compatible with the layout customizations site owners have made, but it might have minor impacts on how your site looks. See this help article for details. As part of these changes, we grouped related Colors and Fonts settings to make them easier to understand. We also added a “from theme” option to each variable which makes it easy to revert to the original theme value. And we now allow the gadgets in the canvas to be styled separately from the gadgets in the sidebar.

Finally, we heard from you that it was often confusing to have your site content appear in one language, while other areas of the site appear in the user’s language. To improve this we now offer a site language configuration in general settings (“Other stuff”) which allows this to be uniform.

Posted by Jens Alfke, Software Engineer

Google Sites Bulk File Uploader – now shipping!

Desktop utility automates the creation of large document repositories on Google Sites

Atlanta, Georgia — May 19, 2009 — Cloud Sherpas, leading Google Apps enterprise deployment partner, announced today the general availability of the Google Sites Bulk File Uploader — a desktop application that automates the upload of large document repositories to Google Sites, saving you the time from an otherwise manual process.

The Google Sites Bulk File Uploader preserves the folder hierarchies in your existing file system by creating Google Sites file cabinet pages for each nested folder. Once uploaded to Google Sites, your organization can take advantage of a fully-indexed, searchable document repository powered by Google search.

The Google Sites Bulk File Uploader recently helped TechCFO, a growing financial services firm, migrate 700+ files and folders from Microsoft Exchange Public Folders to Google Sites. Once in Google Sites, the files were indexed by Google, making years of collective intellectual property instantly available to TechCFO via Google Search. “The Google Sites Bulk File Uploader enabled our firm to rapidly deploy a Google Sites intranet with fast, secure access to the firm’s collective intellectual capital,” said Neal Miller, partner at TechCFO.

To learn more about how TechCFO’s is using Google Sites and the Google Sites Bulk File Uploader, read the case study here or watch this recorded webinar.

To download a FREE evaluation version of the Google Sites Bulk File Uploader, visit our website at: http://www.cloudsherpas.com/solutions/google-sites-bulk-file-uploader/.

About Cloud Sherpas
Cloud Sherpas (www.cloudsherpas.com) is a cloud computing systems integrator and application developer. As a leading Google Enterprise partner, Cloud Sherpas helps organizations leverage Google Apps and Google App Engine to dramatically reduce IT expenses. The company delivers deployment, change management, support and development services to commercial, enterprise and educational institutions seeking to adopt cloud computing.

Cloud Sherpas is a Google Apps Authorized Reseller and enterprise deployment partner. The company also supports cloud computing solutions from EMC/Decho, TriCipher and other best-in-breed vendors.

Google, Google Apps, Google Sites and Google Apps Authorized Reseller are trademarks of Google Inc.

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Coming July 2009: Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry® Enterprise Server

Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry® Enterprise Server will allow users to access Gmail, Google Calendar and Contacts using built-in BlackBerry® applications. Google Apps Connector installs on BlackBerry® Enterprise Server, connecting it to the Google Apps servers and synchronizes email, calendar and contacts for BlackBerry® users. This functionality will be generally available in July 2009.

Download the Google Apps BES Datasheet