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Sharing the holiday spirit on Google Sites

Whether you are sharing best wishes and memories with friends and family or organizing winter activities, Google Sites can help you enjoy your holidays more. We love seeing how people are using Google Sites over the holidays, and wanted to share a few fun things we noticed.

If you are looking to spruce up your site or blog with some holiday imagery, take a look at karlaslayouts. Or perhaps you’d like to bring friends together for ice skating or sledding like the FCCC club site does. Going to a cool (no pun intended) winter festival? Share your experience online like this site does for the Harbin international ice and snow sculpture festival.

There are many ways to get into the holiday spirit, and we liked the tips from the Sweet Autumn project on ways to give back during the holidays. If singing is your thing, the TCCC Youth Group site has lyrics and videos of popular Christmas carols. And don’t forget all the great holiday foods out there, like the deserts and fun treats in Christmas gift baskets on these sites.

We hope all our users have a great holiday season, and if you haven’t finished your holiday shopping yet, make sure to check out these popular gift ideas and special discounts from Google Product Search and Google Checkout.

Google Sites the Next Sharepoint

While this approach may work in the enterprise space in the short term, in the long run, they're alienating the very people whose alliances they need in order to become a success. Today, with Google's announcement of Google Sites, the blogosphere is already comparing the product to Sharepoint and trying to drive nails into Microsoft's coffin. I'd argue that it's far too soon to claim that Google is offering anything that really has a shot at making a dent in the enterprise world.

As an online suite of applications, email, calendaring, IM, and even security and compliance with Postini's help, Google Apps is off to a good start as being a suite that really has it together. For the small to medium size business, you could say that Google makes a strong offering as a more affordable alternative to Microsoft Servers and applications. However, it's a big jump from offering tools to a mom-and-pop as compared with a global, Fortune 500 company.

Google is actually going about marketing to the enterprise market in a pretty ingenious way - they're not. Instead, they're bypassing the IT department (who would, in all honesty, probably laugh at the thought) and marketing their suite on the sly directly to the employees themselves: "Are the tools provided by your IT department too unwieldy to use? Is IT to slow to respond to your needs? Then forget IT and use Google Apps instead!" This is definitely a good plan for Google in the short term, but it's not one that is going to be good for them in the long run...especially when IT catches on to what their users are doing.

Google Sites Launched

Google finally launched a service that uses JotSpot's technology: Google Sites. The new service is a part of Google Apps and allows you to create web sites collaboratively. "People can work together on a Site to add file attachments, information from other Google applications (like Google Docs, Google Calendar, YouTube and Picasa), and new free-form content. Creating a site together is as easy as editing a document, and you always control who has access, whether it's just yourself, your team, or your whole organization," explains Google.

Google offers templates, a rich-text editor, 10GB of storage for each Google Apps account and integration with other Google services so you can embed gadgets, calendars, spreadsheets, presentations, photo slideshows and videos. You can invite people to collaborate or just view a site and you can also publish the site so that anyone can view it.

Google Sites overview

Google Sites is the easiest way to make information accessible to people who need quick, up-to-date access. People can work together on a Site to add file attachments, information from other Google applications (like Google Docs, Google Calendar, YouTube and Picasa), and new free-form content. Creating a site together is as easy as editing a document, and you always control who has access, whether it's just yourself, your team, or your whole organization. You can even publish Sites to the world. The Google Sites web application is accessible from any internet connected computer.

Quick facts

Single-click page creation

Creating a new page for your Google Site just takes the click of a button.

No HTML required

Creating a Google Site is as easy as editing a document, which means there's no markup language for you to learn -- just get started.

Make it your own

Our customization options let you give your Google Site your own look and feel

Get started with templates

We offer a growing list of page types -- web page, announcements, file cabinet, dashboard and list -- to help you get started with your Google Sites pages.

Upload files and attachments

Use the file cabinet to upload files up to 10MB in size. Each Google Apps account receives at least 10GB of storage in Google Sites. Google Apps Premier and Education editions get an additional 500MB for each user account.

Embed rich content

Google Sites is integrated with other Google products, so you can insert videos, docs, spreadsheets, presentations, photo slide shows, and calendars directly onto your Google Sites pages.

Work together and share

Our permission settings let you designate owners, viewers and collaborators (meaning they can edit pages) for your site. And you can make your Google Sites available to just a few people, your entire organization, or the world.

Search with Google

You can search across Google Sites pages and content using powerful Google search technology. You'll find specific pages and documents instantly, the same way you would on Google.com.