Workgroup project sites - Part 1 - Google Sites

It’s been said that an army marches on its stomach. Likewise, an IT project runs on communication. The best indicator of project success is team members that communicate with each other.

While attitude is always the first, best ingredient in team communications, an effective infrastructure greases the wheels. The rising star of team communications are workgroup project sites, hosted on platforms like SharePoint, Google Apps, BaseCamp, Office Online, and Open Atrium. A workgroup site acts as a digital binder for a project, keeping shared files and messages together in one place.

In part one of this series of blogs, we look at using Google Apps to host a workgroup project site.

Google Apps is a collection of workgroup tools, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Sites.

Google Sites is a simple, entry-level content management system, on par with 1999 “build it yourself” web site technology. When creating a site, you can select from a library of preformed templates, or start from scratch. Different types of pages can be created with the site, including web pages, announcements, file cabinets, lists, or a start page.

Once created, a site can be made public or shared with anyone in your Google Apps domain. You can also share the site on a one-by-one basis with any Google Account.

A very handy Google Sites feature is that existing sites can be copied to new sites. Copying sites makes it easy to create boilerplate sites that have both a design and starter content.

You can also subscribe to alerts for the entire site, or just for individual pages. Once you subscribe, the site sends you an email alert whenever there is a change. With alerts, people don’t have to post something to the site, and then turn around and tell everyone they posted it.

For workgroup project sites, I usually start with four core pages: Announcements, Calendar, Contact List, and File Cabinet, along with a Starter Page.

Announcements - I usually rename the Announcement page to “Messages” to encourage using it for project communications. You can create a “New Post” that is linked into the page, much like a simple forum or wall. The page can accept attachments, and participants can also comment on the page, or edit it directly.

Calendar - Linking a Google Calendar to the site is a great way to keep track of project milestones. If you are already using Google Calendar for other things, the site calendar can be linked in with your other calendars. Though, since you can’t change it directly from the site, new participants always have trouble editing the calendar the first time. You have to pull up your own Google Calendar and change it there.

Contact List - Google sites comes with a general purpose list applet. Each list item can have multiple fields of different types, like Text, Date, Dropdown, Checkbox, or URL. You can select a common layout or select your own column layout.

File Cabinet - The file upload/download feature is very handy. Any type of binary or text file can be uploaded. It versions each upload of the same name, and you can easily go back and grab a prior version. The cabinet also accepts URLs, making it easy to link out to Google Docs and other online resources.

For some projects, we might also add ToDo lists and such, but for most projects, Announcements, Calendar, Contact List, and File Cabinet, are the assets you need to keep communications flowing.

While useful, the Google Sites UI and feature set is lacking in several ways. A key problem is that participants need to Google Accounts to join the site. While that sounds simple, in practice we have a lot of trouble getting new participants from other companies logged into a site for the first time.

An alternative to Google Sites, BaseCamp, provides a fresh and friendly UI and a streamlined login process. Stay tuned for Part 2!