Google relaunches JotSpot as Web publishing tool

IDG News Service - The JotSpot hosted wiki service will be reborn today as Google Sites, a new piece of the Google Apps hosted collaboration and communication suites.

JotSpot's relaunch under a different name and a revamped architecture finally answers how this hosted wiki service was retooled, almost a year and a half after Google acquired the company.

With Google Sites, teams within an organization can build Web sites to collaborate on projects. It's not necessary to know HTML or Web design to create the sites, according to Google.

"Information in organizations is siloed. Teams have difficulty pulling together all the information they need to collaborate," said Rishi Chandra, Google Apps product manager. "With Google Sites, teams can bring this all together in one central place."

Teams can embed a variety of files and content from other Google applications and services, including video clips from YouTube, images from Picasa and Apps' spreadsheets, text documents, presentations and calendars.

Google Sites aims to be a simpler, more scalable and less expensive alternative to products like Microsoft's SharePoint and IBM's Lotus Notes, said Matthew Glotzbach, product management director of Google's enterprise unit.

Google acquired JotSpot in October 2006, closed off new account registrations for it and kept mostly mum about its plans. Although Google continued supporting JotSpot customers, they sometimes complained about hosting outages and performance problems and about lack of responsiveness for technical support queries.

Jay Dempsey, marketing director at Heritage's Dairy Stores in Thoroughfare, N.J., had big plans for JotSpot. However, Heritage's, a user since 2005, hasn't touched JotSpot in the past six months. Google's long silence made Dempsey concerned that the product could be phased out.

"I didn't know where they were going with it, so I backed off using it and didn't pursue any [new projects] because I was afraid it would be a waste of our time," Dempsey said.

About 20 users at Heritage's had been successfully using JotSpot, mostly to collaborate on coordinating IT projects. Dempsey had plans to roll out JotSpot broadly among the company's more than 500 employees.

Now, no one uses it. The former JotSpot users at Heritage's are back using conventional software applications like Microsoft's Excel to keep tabs on team projects. Dempsey first heard about Google Sites late yesterday from the IDG News Service.

A Google spokesman said JotSpot users will be notified via e-mail today about Google Sites. Most JotSpot wikis will be migrated to Google Sites, while a few with many customized features built using JotSpot's APIs will have to be moved later, Glotzbach said.

Founded in 2004, JotSpot had an installed base of thousands of organizations when Google acquired the company. JotSpot had been praised for its ease of use and extensible architecture.