3 Ways Your Enterprise Can Use Google Sites

Intranets, team collaboration sites and document archives powered by Google

While Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs capture much of the Google Apps spotlight, it seems only appropriate to shed light on Google Sites — another key component of the enterprise suite.  An exploration of the discussions on Twitter reveals a community abuzz with the innovation and functionality of Google Sites.

Google Sites is an enterprise wiki that all Google Apps users can benefit from.  It’s easy to use, quick to deploy, and nicely integrated with the rest of the Apps suite.  Companies that adopt Google Sites cut additional expense from their IT budget while increasing their employee’s productivity, further leveraging their investment in Google Apps.

1.  Company intranets. Traditional intranets provide enormous value to organizations, but fall short in terms of collaboration and ease of use. With only a handful of authorized editors, a traditional intranet doesn’t allow a general user to contribute content, making it a challenge to keep content fresh and important resources up-to-date.  Google Sites is inherently collaborative and simple to use, and with its robust permission schema, offers a platform to build an intranet for your users managed by your users.

2.  Team/project sites. Forget about complex SharePoint sites or cludgy Lotus QuickPlaces — there is a better way for teams to share information and stay connected.  Cloud Sherpas makes heavy use of Google Sites in every client engagement, creating a central resource for both internal and external team members to share files, keep meeting notes, and track progress. And with native hooks into other Google Apps modules, sharing calendars and other team resources is a snap.

3.  Archives. Much like your company intranet, the value of your archives depends heavily on how easy it is to recall files from its depths.  For traditional file shares and document repositories, this is achieved by mandating a rigid hierarchy, which as we all know, is very difficult to maintain over time.  As one might expect, an archive supported by Google would naturally come with Google-powered search.  The many of you familiar with Gmail should realize how much a difference it would make to be able to search through thousands of files in your archives with the ease that Google search exhibits in Gmail, especially if you forget the exact file name or location.

To get more out of your Google Apps deployments, Cloud Sherpas is developing a suite of Google Apps productivity tools.  The first product in our suite is the Google Sites Bulk File Uploader. Go ahead and try it!  Because I think we can agree that no one should be charged with the cruel and unusual punishment of manually clicking, finding, and uploading hundreds or thousands of files, the Google Sites Bulk File Uploader allows you to easily transfer an unlimited number of files and folders to Google Sites with just a few clicks.

You can download an evaluation version and see how easy it is to move files to Google Sites.

TechCFO, a financial services consulting firm, used the Google Sites Bulk File Uploader to migrate a large document repository from Microsoft Exchange Public Folders (an archive system without a search function!) to Google Sites.  Once the documents arrived in Google, they were indexed and immediately searchable.  The Bulk File Uploader helped facilitate what otherwise would have been an arduous task and turned an unused file share into an indispensable resource for their growing organization. Read the case study here.

So this was our effort to convince you that Google Sites is worth a first date, and that we have the tools to help you get more out of your deployments.  Stay tuned, because this Friday we’ll be announcing an upgrade to our Bulk File Uploader that will give you additional flexibility and control over the file transfer to Google Sites.  It’s a simple concept, but the payoffs are great.

Want more proof that you’ll love the Uploader?  Take a screenshot of you using the free evaluation version and twitpic it to us.  Starting… now, if you’re one of the first five, we’ll give you or your company an Express license for free!  So save yourself the normal cost of $295, and move 100 files or folders to Google Sites for free!

Oh, I suppose this requires you to follow us on Twitter.