The birth of GooglePoint

Or maybe we should call it Share-gle. Or I suppose we could let it keep the name Google gave it, Google Sites. Announced today - conveniently timed to happen the week prior to the MS SharePoint conference - Google Sites appears to be their response to SharePoint. It is targeted at the Google Apps Team Edition crowd of small businesses, not end users, and is designed to provide a collaboration environment, with Wikis, shared calendars & documents (both provided by Google Apps, conveniently enough), aggregation of RSS feeds and more.

Basically it is everything that SharePoint offers, though without the integration to legacy data systems or granular security options, though there are some pretty reasonable basic security settings that should meet most SMB needs.

Still, if you've got everything in Google Apps already, this is a no-brainer in terms of setting up a sharing site (both in whether you should or not and how complicated it is to make one). Even if you aren't using Google Apps yet, the option to quickly deploy this solution for a project team, either internal or shared between internal and outside resources, it quite an attractive option.

Consider this a significant "shot across the bow" of Microsoft in the collaboration space.