Google has recently announced the addition of Google Sites to Google Apps. How is this different from Google Web Pages that was previously included in Google Apps?

Well, one thing to know is that it doesn’t replace Google Web Pages, it exists in addition to it. However I think most of our customers will find the extra versatility of Google Sites will make using Google Web Pages a thing of the past.

One of the first new features is that you can set domain-wide standards for sharing site pages just like you do for docs. 
This can be a powerful feature, allowing you to truly create a secure intranet or making the site public to all or any of the other options between these two extremes shown in the screen capture above. When you create a new site within your Google Apps domain, you’ll find that you have the option to set the sharing for this page. The choices you made at the corporate level will determine the options that show up when you create a new page. If you’ve selected the most restrictive option in the configuration, you’ll see this when you create a new site: while if you selected to allow users to make the sites public,  you’ll see .

In addition to creating single or two column layouts based on a number of different themes, this tool also has some great Inserts that you can use to spice up your pages. Here is a screenshot of the current offerings:

For those of you looking to use this as an intranet, this is probably the closest thing, so far, to getting a Gdrive for Google Apps. With 10GB of storage with all levels of of Google Apps (with an additional 500MB for each user in the premium and education versions), you’ve got plenty of room to post PDFs or other items to share with your users that just can’t be done in the world of Google Docs. The only downside is that you are limited to no more than 10MB per file so this probably isn’t the best place to be sharing your music collections with the users in your domain.

 

Want to get this set up on your site? You can turn this on for yourself by going to the administrative control panel found at https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/yourdomainname.com and clicking on the "Add more services" link. 

Some of you may find that you already have the Google Sites icon active on your home page since recently a portion of the Google Apps setup allows you to choose to . If this was turned on for your domain, you should find that this feature is automatically enabled on your Google Apps setup.

If you’d like assistance setting this up on your Google Apps, we can make the required DNS changes and turn on this feature for you if you’d like for a low one-time fee.