After 16 months the recent release of Google Sites was disappointing on many levels. There is no API, where there was one in JotSpot (before Google bought it). JotSpot was built as a wiki application environment (another that we know of that includes collaboration functions is GroveSite). I realize that Google had to re-write much of JotSpot over the last 16 months (at least we hope that is what they were doing) to make it fit with the Google architecture, but in the re-write they not only lost a lot of functionality, but many of the functions that are available either don’t work or don’t meet the usual Google intuitive UI standards.

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In playing with the application, sign-in was easy enough and colleagues at CommunityXperts invited me onto one of their sites to test the software. It does not say “Beta” anywhere like many of the Google applications do, and I guess that is because this is “alpha” software, and they want us to debug it for them. Overall navigation was not too bad, and there was a “site map” on the navigation bar on the left-hand side of the page if I got lost. The home page showed new blog posts (or announcements). It also showed me a list of links and a space for documents.

Document Directions

So the first thing I did was try to upload some documents to share with a colleague. It was fine if they were smaller documents and they uploaded quickly and painlessly. However, I had a 30MB file, a large presentation I wanted to share with a colleague. OK, I use 37 Signals Basecamp with my publisher (see my new book Collaboration 2.0) and it has a warning limiting upload file size to 30 MB. OK, so I tried uploading this document/presentation on Google Sites and after a few minutes it looked like it uploaded, but nothing showed up, there was no warning that the file was too large, nothing. Now this is not rocket science and I guess I expected better from Google.

Dashboard Pages

The next thing I tried to do was to create a page. Google Sites gives you 5 options of page types: Web Page, Dashboard, Announcements, File Cabinet and List. So I tried to create a dashboard page. It first asks you where you want to put the page, at the top level or under Home, which was all well and good, so in my eagerness I hit the “create a page” button and nothing happens. I finally figured out that it wanted me to name the page (no warning or pop-up to let me know this was the problem). Once I named the page a new screen popped up with 4 rectangles on it with a drop down menu for gadgets.

Besides having some cursor problems when I hover over one of the rectangles I selected the first gadget in the drop down for “Images” it then asked me to upload an image. So I uploaded the cover for my Collaboration 2.0 book. It seemed to upload OK, this is a 193KB JPG image which appeared in the “Add an image’ window. However, when I went to hit the “Save” button, nothing happens. There is no warning the image is too large, and no other indication of what the problem is. I tried to hit the “save” button but to no effect. I finally hit the “Add image” button again and it pasted the image onto the page.

Calendars, Presentations and Spreadsheets

So I moved on to the next gadget. Here I tried to add a calendar, thinking that it would put in some kind of blank calendar that I could upload my free-busy times from Outlook into and share with my colleagues. However, this is not really the case. I was asked for the URL for a Google calendar (which you had to create in advance in another Google application and know the URL for). So this was useless (at least for right now until I created a Google calendar), so I tried the Document gadget, the presentation gadget, the spreadsheet gadget, the spreadsheet form gadget, and all the same thing, they needed to be previously made and you need to know their URL.

Additionally, when I hover over one of the gadget rectangles in the lower half of the dashboard page and open the drop down menu, the drop down goes off the end of the page, and you can’t see many of the gadget options at the bottom of the list.

At this point I started looking for the “alpha” at the top of the application to signify that I had mistakenly gotten into some early unreleased version of Google Sites, but no such luck. This tool has the fit and finish of a Yugo, when I expected at least the polish of a Ford or Chevy. There was some thought put into the UI, but not much.

For JotSpot it is a big step backwards, and without an API there are limited options. Google has hundreds if not thousands of gadgets I can put on iGoogle, yet I saw none of those in the list on Google sites. What if I wanted one of the rectangles on my dashboard to be an RSS feed, how do I do that? After waiting all this time for something to come out of the JotSpot acquisition by Google I was very disappointed by this first release of Sites. Are people looking to migrate from Notes or SharePoint into a lighter weight Web 2.0 tool like Sites… not if they had a similar experience to mine! Can you create Wiki-like web pages with Sites…sure, but not anything that most enterprises would want.

Enterprise or Consumer?

I have not yet figured out how to deal with CSS style sheets or some of the other intricacies of Sites, but the bigger question is why did they take an enterprise-level product like JotSpot and create a consumer-oriented product like Sites from it. One can only speculate that there is some uber-plan for world domination by Google that has not been revealed to the rest of us, but I would not recommend Sites to any of my enterprise clients, at least not the current version.