JotSpot Archive

Rob Hof at BusinessWeek is reporting that Jotspot will be relaunching tonight as "Google Sites" as part of the Apps Premier Edition offering a free version and a $50/year per user with a SLA. The Google Sites site is available now. Google acquired JotSpot in late 2006 and has basically been idling as of late. Currently the Sites login page is only allowing @jotspot.com email addresses access into the system.

Google describes Google Sites as, "Create a single place to bring together all the information your team needs to share, including docs, videos, photos, calendars and attachments." It looks like these tools are meant for internal team use.

Hof believes this is a hit against Microsoft Sharepoint or IBM’s Lotus Notes. Not really a fair comparison as both of these offerings are much more robust. However, could this be a direct attack at pbWiki which is widely used for team and internal wikis? And for the sharing functions for rich media, is it an attack against the white label social networking providers including KickApps, Ning, Magnify, etc?

Rex Hammock hopes that Google Sites helps people "get" wikis. I hope people never get caught up on lingo – as long as it does what they need it to, who cares what it’s called. Rafe Needleman has some good screenshots and discussion on how Google Sites fits into the overall Google office suite.

Hof notes that company personnel may push the use of Google Sites outside of IT department approval and by the time IT gets involved, it will be too late and they will be forced to use the tool. I disagree with this but today IT has to be more proactive with forward-moving technologies than they ever have been before. The days of an AS/400 sitting in the closet are over.