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.

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

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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