Google Apps: The Missing Manual

Chapter 12. Bring Your Team Together with Google Sites

Google Sites takes collaboration to a whole new level. Sure, you can work with others on individual files in Google Docs or share calendars in Google Calendar, but Sites provides a common staging ground for all those activities and more. It’s not just a Web site where people can work together—it’s a Web site that people can work on together. In geekspeak, that’s called a wiki—a site that lets anyone add, edit, or delete content using nothing more than a Web browser. (Well, maybe not anyone. Don’t worry, you can set access permissions.) This means that people in your organization can work as a team to quickly build specialized sites: for a project, a training program, a personalized company directory, and way, way more.

In a sense, Google Sites unifies all the Google apps. Embed a spreadsheet on one page, attach files to another, display a calendar, insert view-on-demand videos and presentations, sprinkle Google gadgets throughout the pages—the possibilities are limited only by what your team thinks up. Then, invite others to come over and view or, even better, work on all this stuff together. Sites gives you a central place to share the work you’ve been cooking up in all the other apps.

Unlike the other flagship Google apps (Gmail, Calendar, and so on), though, Sites is available only to those with a Google Apps account. That means you have to be part of a Google Apps domain to use Sites. (If you’re not sure what that means, flip ...