As a company IT Link Maine will hopefully soon be an official Google Apps for Businesses re-seller. I thought i’d take a minute to write about the awesome features Google Apps has. One of the coolest things I’ve seen to date is Google Sites, this reminds me why I love technology so much. It’s awesome to see something new, experiment with it and come up with real world examples of how it can be integrated into what we do everyday. It’s a tough sell to get a group of users who are so accustomed to using a Windows environment coupled with Microsoft Office to switch to using Google Docs exclusively and one of the downfalls in my opinion is the lack of integration of Google Docs with Windows. There are a few third party options out there but nothing that Google themselves have developed which I’m a little discouraged with. So the transition is a tough one but the benefits seem to be endless.

Back to Google Sites, the integration of Google Docs with Google Sites simply blew my mind. It’s obvious that this is the direct competitor to Microsoft’s Share Point except in my opinion it’s much better.  I immediately thought of a solution that would help I.T. Link and a company we work with mange projects better and also provide a location where users can go to track the progress of our projects as well as access all of the files associated with the projects we have going. Specifically, we do a large amount of Price updates which involves many spreadsheets from multiple vendors and in addition to that we maintain a separate sheet that holds information such as when the pricing for individual vendors was imported and completion date. Google Sites allowed us to put all of this information in one easily accessible private location. For this particular company they are a Google Apps business user which means we could structure the access to this site based on user. The direct integration of Google Sites with Google Docs is awesome and we’ll be recommending this to all of our clients.