Why Google Apps is so Cool
In one evening I "developed" an intranet system for my household complete with email, calendar, file sharing, chat, customized views of information, widgets and RSS feeds. If you’ve used gmail before, it’s basically the same concept only they are extending it to allow shared info under your own domain. I also have pointed the domain thoughtsparks.net to this blog which gives me an instant homepage for the domain. Yeah, with work and side pro-bono stuff it may be a while before I actually build-out the cool new site for thoughtsparks.net but for now I’m rolling. It’s a no-cost deal but if you want more than 2 GB space and a few other bells and whistles you’ll have to pay $50 a year. Still not bad for all the capabilities in one centralized deal that is quick to configure.
Still, this is a very new feature for Google, so they have some kinks to work out namely:
- The configuration for the "intranet" home page is a little clunky. It’s not as smooth as the customizable tweaks in Blogger. I was able to tweak the header a bit to reduce the screen space but what a bummer for folks who don’t want to mess w/ HTML tags.
- The website hosting capability they do offer does not yet integrate with Blogger which is kind of a drag. Sure I could use their clunky WYSIWYG tool and probably find a way to integrate an RSS feed but if I’m going to do much development on a new site, I think I’ll use something like WordPress on my hosted account with 1and1.com. (Which by the way I really do like as a host service). You can upload your own HTML files but who wants to mess w/ a static site, major retro move.
Okay, so it’s not perfect, but for small organizations, churches, clubs, groups etc. it provides a lot of functionality for the right price. It would certainly be possible for an organization to host all of their online needs on Google Apps, but you’d have to do some monkeying around w/ feed your blogger feeds back into the site. My recommendation at this point is to host a site with database capability and manage the rest of your services through Google Apps. That is until Google offers integrates Blogger well and/or ads db functionality, which they will do in time, just watch ‘em.