Don't forget about us pure-play collaboration vendors!

PBwiki offers all the functionality of Google Sites and more. Plus, we host 450,000 wikis and have *thousands* of paying customers, including Facebook, Symantec, DePaul University, and the FDA.

But I definitely agree that this is a good move for Google. And while Google Sites is too rudimentary to take on SharePoint yet, I'm sure that's where Google is headed in the future.

Hopefully Google's entrance into the space will prove a catalyst, and we can make a good living for ourselves with our paid premium product, much as WordPress/Automattic and Omniture have done while competing with Blogger and Google Analytics respectively.

A terrific move for Google. But I really am concerned that this will cause malicious persons to begin to target Google Apps for phishing scams. If people start to build their corporate intranets on this platform, there will be some significant value hidden behind that creaky username and password.

After waiting expectantly for the release of Google Sites, the success to Jotspot, for more than a year, I must confess I'm pretty disappointed in the result. The user interface is clunky and non-intuitive and offers little new in the way of collaborative tools, other than Joomla-esq shared web page editing.

What happened? Google already has a terrific widget enabled web page creation tool. It's called Blogger! Why didn't they use that technology to make dropping various functional elements onto a page easy?

The ability to quickly create an Intranet/Xtranet of four to twenty pages is what most of my SMB clients are looking for. Doing this with SharePoint has always been too developer and infrastructure intensive, leaving us to recommend products like WebOffice (formerly Intranets.com) and Blue Tie as web-based collaboration tools.

BlueTie in unique in that it offers unique ways for partners to monetize the solution and generate a unique ongoing revenue stream. In fact, BlueTie was recently recognized as an OnMedia Top 100 Winner.

Google has missed the mark badly with its Google Sites application. It's unfortunate, because it takes the pressure off Microsoft to improve SharePoint's ease of use and Cisco to lower the cost of WebOffice.

Until Google releases a Google Sites application that is significantly easier to use and functional, I will continue to recommend WebOffice, Blue Tie or our own TeamPro application as a Intranet/Xtranet solution.

What might be more interesting is that Google may be secretly involved in a movie called Infinite Play the first movie that blends with reality and features dynamic audience participation. It mentioned Google Sites long ago and that it would be used to solve the mysteries in infinite play the movie. Buried in the movie site are terms that specify Google employees cannot participate in the suprizes. The leads and clues can be found using Google which is referred to as the Great Oracle. In fact if you Google infinite play the movie the links lead one on a great journey.

This is great news but I can't find any information regarding the roadmap for existing JotSpot users. Any other JotSpoters out there who know how we'll migrate our existing JotSpot sites to this new service?