Srcasm

I have recently been playing with Google Sites quite a bit more than I previously had.  This is due to both curiosity (as to its uses) and the need from a few clients.  As I said before, at first glance it looks pretty lame but under the hood it could become your next Sharepoint system.

From customizing the look and feel to importing videos and photos, Google Sites allows users to quickly bring media to their personal sites and potentially to their internal company sites if used like a wiki.

Google allows its users to setup sharing preferences — Who can view, edit and control sharing are all available to all Google Sites users.  Some of the tips and tricks I’ve found that could be helpful follow:

• Changing colors – Google allows the customization of almost all of the colors within a site.  From background to text and borders and columns, you can choose almost any color of the rainbow with their easy-to-use color chooser.
• Importing Google Calendars – So you’ve got your site setup and now you want to share your internal company events?  No problem with Google Sites.  Setup a Google Calendar, list the events you want and then pop it right into your site.  No coding, just a simple link copy-and-paste.
• Mapping subdomains – Subdomains are the ability to put something before the top level domain.  ”www” in www.srcasm.com is a subdomain and that could be anything I want.  So if you have a few internal company sites that you’d like setup, just choose a different subdomain to keep the links short and people coming back.
• Mapping domains – Now that you’ve setup a simple test site, why not map a full domain to it?  If I wanted, I could move srcasm.com over to Google and allow people to view my site there instead of http://sites.google.com/a/srcasm.com/test.  Seems simpler, right?
• Granular sharing – As I stated before, Google allows you to choose who can view and edit your pages.  If it’s an internal site, let your whole team modify the page but if it’s client facing, maybe external text is better left for the PR people.
• Contact forms using Google Docs – Lastly, which I just found, is that Google Forms (a separate area in Google Docs) can allow you to setup a survey or a contact form in under 5 minutes.  These can then be placed onto your Google Site with a few clicks of the mouse or almost anywhere else on the web with a simple copy-and-paste.

These are just a few of the neat things that Google Sites allows users to do.  I keep finding new things to add to sites and new ways of making people and groups more efficient while using Google as both a wiki or an external company site.

Tags: calendar, colors, company, customize, design, docs, google, Productivity, sharepoint, sites, spreadsheet, survey, wiki

This entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 6:06 pm and is filed under SaaS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.