Google Sites - 2008 or Bust!

Why be sad about it?! It's better to think that the Page Creator has gone off to a farm and is playing with rabbits and other small furry animals, and that it's happy… It didn't die, it wasn't obliterated by the big bad and soon to come JotSpot based service, it's just gone for a while and when it gets bored of living on that farm, it will most definitely come back and play with us.

There, all better now, isn't it? Wipe those tears, they don't suit you, bad-ass looking engineers, with your glasses and mean frown due to over-exposure to LCDs. Ok, I might have been pulling your leg so far, but it's actually true; Scott Johnson, a former JotSpot executive, held a presentation and revealed some of the plans for Google Apps and for a number of other Google services.

"Scheduled to be launched sometime next year (2008), Google Sites will expand upon the Google Page Creator already offered within Apps. Based on JotSpot collaboration tools, Sites will allow business to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration," Johnson said.

The highlight was the announcement that, as expected, most of the Google services will become Gears-enabled and will start to work even when they you're offline, as Ionut Alex. Chitu reported. The question was specifically asked, whether users would be able to edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations offline, and the answer was a definite "yes" and that in addition to all that, Google Gears will also support GMail and Google Calendar, but it'll still take a short while to get there. Another addition is expected to be made to the array of Google Apps, more specifically GrandCentral acquired in February 2007, but this is still not going to happen very soon.