Google Sites News & Articles

Google pumped up its search results this week with the addition of Plus posts. At the same time, Sites became more exclusive with page-level sharing permissions, and plans for a new Google campus are exciting people of the geek variety in what has traditionally been a Microsoft-led environment. 

Google Sites gives users with little to no HTML knowledge a widely accessible vehicle for building websites. Today the popular platform was granted a timely boost with the addition of a mobile component for creating simplified landing pages. 

Google-focused systems integrator and developer Appogee offers a way to add workflow features for users publishing and working in Google Sites.

Brand newness came to Google Sites and Docs this week in the form of horizontal navigation, global footers, and quick links. Check it out.

Long has there been discussion about which is better, Google Sites or SharePoint. Google aims to come out the winner, as it adds new functionality to Google Sites in the form of functionally designed site templates.

There’s nothing like an annual conference for launching a new product. This year’s Insight 2009 conference to be held next week in Orlando, FL, is no different with conference organizer Westbrook Technologies( news, site) launching their new cloud-ready document management software. FortisBlue is a thin client that captures, archives, searches, annotates, retrieves and safeguards paper and electronic documents.

And while other Fortis products are scalable to (theoretically) any size enterprise, this document management software would seem to indicate that Westbrook is now actively chasing the SMB market.

Utah-based Web analytics provider Omniture (news, site) fed the development fire this week by opening up a public beta of the Omniture Developer Sandbox.

By utilizing the SiteCatalyst development environment, developers can tinker with a set of test data or upload custom data of their own. Along with a full set of integration APIs for bi-directional data exchange and administration between developer applications and Omniture products, the sandbox aims to ease the creation process.

"Because of the Omniture Developer Sandbox, our community, including interactive agencies, professional services partners, and software developers, can more effectively leverage the 1 trillion transactions we capture for clients each quarter to create innovative solutions for customers," said John Mellor, executive vice president of business development and corporate strategy at Omniture.

The announcement comes as a follow up to Omniture's June 2009 promise to provide real-life data and information. It also follows close behind Adobe's US$ 1.8b acquisition of the company, which continues to fuel a lot of speculation over what's next for Web analytics, among other things. 

Wanna play? Interested developers can request access here. 

Given the amount of data that sit in SharePoint worldwide, given how eager Google seems to be about enterprise apps these days, and given the size of Google's appetite for data, we must say...it's about time.

With the introduction of Google's new Sites API -- and some tools that explicitly pull stuff out of SharePoint and place it into Google Sites -- the real heat between Redmond and Mountain View is finally starting to build. Let's have a look.

Some may have noticed the abrupt style in which Google announced the end of Google Page Creator, a free online tool that allowed users to create and publish web pages.

Google announced today that they were opening up their online web site, Google Sites, to anyone who wanted to have one. Previously this service was only available to companies using Google Apps or to people who wanted to host their websites with Google but still had their own domain. Now, any registered Google user can sign up for a free website, prompting some to call it “Geocities 2.0”, naming it after the ubiquitous free website provider of the mid-late 90s.