Google Sites with API: Still No SharePoint Killer

Added By Adriaan Bloem at 2-Oct-2009 | Twitter: @adriaanbloem |

Is Google Sites a SharePoint killer? Well, to be fair, I haven't heard the exact term this past week, but the innuendo was clearly there. Google's "Data Liberation Front" released an API for Sites, which allows you to get your data out of it; but also, to import data from another product. Say, SharePoint. And this has fed pundit's speculation (yet again) that this might be some serious competition for Microsoft.

So to answer that question: is Sites, with the API, some kind of quiet assassin? A stealthy ninja perhaps? Should Microsoft enter SharePoint into a software protection program? Well, hardly. But like a year and a half ago, when everybody was shouting murder, that's not the point.

First of all, while it's certainly nice to have an import/export feature for Sites, it's just an API. You'll have to do all the legwork yourself. There is a Google code project to actually build a tool to get data in and out, but it only allows import and export of an XHTML copy of Sites. Google Enterprise partner LTech claims to have built a "powerful and easy to use" migration tool called SharePoint Move for Google Apps (which is linked to a lot), but it's not clear what it'd actually import into Sites. (Just getting all of the documents out of SharePoint and into Apps seems, well... not so useful.)

Secondly, while I'd agree that SharePoint doesn't give you governance, Sites actually impedes it. As readers of our Social Software & Collaboration Report will know, for an individual Google Site, you can set who can visit it (either everyone, or one specific group) and who can edit it. That's it, and it doesn't get more granular than that. Unless you start embedding documents and spreadsheets from Google Apps, which have their own authorizations -- and then things start to get really messy (you have access to the Site, but not the document -- or that document you think is secure can be accessed by an invited outsider you don't know about). And there's no way for a group of admins (or governors) to see what's going on in the Sites: there are no overviews. In short, whenever there's a debate on whether it's secure to store information in Apps or Sites, and it meanders off into the realms of SSL and password strength, you should be thinking: that's not the real problem.

And lastly, who uses Sites, anyway? After Google acquired JotSpot, it was closed for business for a year, and then Sites emerged: a stripped-down version of JotSpot. And after the initial hubbub, there was a roar of silence. @GoogleAtWork occasionally tweets about a corporate site done entirely in Sites, but those are always the sites of Google Enterprise partners. And they're the select few where I could see using Sites for an external site would make any sense (since they're selling it, of course.) Other than that, I read about enterprises switching to Apps -- and they get Sites in the deal, but while everyone uses the (g)mail, and many will use the docs (which have some nice collaborative features), few seem to venture into Sites.

To slightly offset all of this, yes, of course there are scenarios where Sites could be useful. These mainly revolve around small companies, with maybe up to 10 or 20 staff (so governance is less of an issue), who aren't in the business of running fileservers, mailservers, webservers, and social software -- Apps, with Sites, is a viable alternative. Running the infrastructure required for SharePoint (and going through the pains of implementing it to do useful things) would make little sense in that case. And for a lot of organizations, maybe especially the larger enterprises, Gmail is a very cost-effective replacement for maintaining in-house mail servers.

Google, however, hints at examples like "your sales team's Google Sites pages can update automatically when new leads are added to your CRM system"; but you'd have to develop the code to do so, first. And right now, there are too many reasons why you wouldn't really want to do that. Likewise, a migration from Notes to Gmail, I could understand. But from custom-built Domino applications to Sites... that's a completely different story.

Sites as a SharePoint killer? No, definitely not. This assassin has to go through ninja school first.

Categories: Adriaan Bloem, Collaboration & Community Software, Google Sites, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, MOSS 2007 WCM, SharePoint