Google News Updates

Google has announced the addition of templates to its Google Sites, an application used to generate hosted Web sites and part of the Google Apps suite.

Accessible to both free and paid users, the templates include complete collaborative workspaces, employee intranets, project tracking sites, team sites, and employee profile pages. Numerous dozen templates are available, with more being added.

Personal templates are also presented, including family sites, neighborhood associations, clubs, charitable causes, weddings and other interests, said Scott Johnston, Google Sites product manager.

Each template is made up of 15 to 20 pre-populated pages, including sample content, page layouts, embedded gadget, navigation links, and themes. The templates can be customized, up to a point, using Google Sites' built-in editing tools.

The objective of the new site templates are to help Google Apps users get collaborative sites up-and-running quickly, particularly for projects and intranets that are a good match for a templated approach.

Google Sites templates will appeal to companies and users who want to get up-and-running quickly and economically, and who value ease-of-use more than an overload of enterprise features that often get in the way.

Google Sites is a straight competitor to Microsoft's SharePoint service that relatively helps users do the same things as Sites does. While there are major differences in the method SharePoint and Google Sites function. SharePoint is a Microsoft association technology that has been criticized as too cumbersome for the needs of many potential customers.

Google and Microsoft both suggest cloud-based applications, seen as a key battleground between the two. Microsoft newly lowered the prices of its online applications to better match Google's pricing for its paid Google Applications Premier Editor.