Google Sites Is Latest Online Office Tool

It looks like the Google(GOOG) shtick of organizing all the world's information and making it "universally useful" now includes everything that needs to get done in and around our small-business lives.

Google has rolled out a collaboration, project-management and office-productivity tool called Google Sites (free to start; more features and support costs $50 person per year as part of the Google Apps package).

The move is part of an overall trend by the Mountain View, Calif.-based company to offer free or low-cost Web-based office-productivity tools.

To have a look, go to the upper-right-hand side of the classic white Google homepage and click on the small "sign-in" button.

Once you're in, open an account -- it's easy and free -- and you will see that Google offers sophisticated word processing, spreadsheets, email, calendaring and many other small-business productivity functions as part of its Google Apps package.

I have said it before, and I will say it again. Please, sign up for one of these accounts, if only to see what you can get for free from Google -- and to understand the threat the technology poses to Microsoft(MSFT), the traditional leader in office-productivity software.

Google Sites puts the company squarely in the middle of the exploding office productivity market, which includes offerings from established companies like Microsoft, Intuit (INTU) and Netsuite(N) along with a veritable blizzard of products from smaller companies such as Basecamp, Zoho, Yuuguu, ThinkFree, Coghead, ConceptShare, Sandy, Jiffle and my favorite name, Remember the Milk.

Google Sites shows just how aggressively the company is willing to push its small-business ambitions: It is part of a fresh strategy for Google called Team Edition, which forces users to work under a common Web identity, their domain name.

In older versions of Google Apps, users had to transfer certain techie details of their Web usage -- which company offers certain types of tech support for their Web site and where some of that data is stored, for instance -- to Google itself. These moves were not that tricky, but they formed a barrier to entry of sorts. They took time and a certain amount of information technology savvy.

No more.

Now users of Google Sites -- even if they have a functioning and robust Google Apps account -- are asked to log in under the domain name of their small business. Clearly, that makes getting going in the collaboration game much easier for the average small business.

Google Sites lets you build a collaborative environment where you can post comments, create calendars, develop to-do lists and post files.

When I tested it, I signed in under my Blumsday.com domain, and was taken to a simple home page where I could invite other members of my business to collaborate with me.

But there's a catch: They could only come in using a functioning Blumsday email. My Earthlink account would not work. So I entered one of my editor's Blumsday email address into the application, and invited her in to share projects and other data doodads of my day-to-day affairs.

Obviously, it is far too early to come down for or against this software. Besides, things are changing so fast at Google that it is hard to say for certain where this product is going.

But in general, Google Sites is a reasonably intuitive collaborative tool -- particularly if you have experience in building such things. You should be able to create a reasonable online work area of to do lists and other project management apps quickly and easily.