A well linked to post over the weekend was Andrew Miller’s notes on a Google Apps presentation. The main presenter was Scott Johnston, former VP of Product Development at JotSpot – one of my favorite Web Office apps that was acquired just over a year ago by Google, but has yet to be turned into a Google Apps product. Well apparently JotSpot is being integrated, according to Miller’s notes.
JotSpot is/was a very flexible wiki-based product, which had spreadsheeting and other office functionality. Miller reported that it will spawn “Google Sites” in 2008, which “will expand upon the Google Page Creator already offered within Apps.” It will be based on JotSpot collaboration tools and will allow businesses to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and “any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration.”
This sounds like an ambitious product and one that may potentially crack open a lucrative market in businesses: intranets and extranets.
For a long time the cash cow of large and complex CMS (content management systems) like Interwoven and Vignette, intranets have been crying out for a web-based collaboration makeover. Blogs, wikis, start pages have all been tried before, but all fell short due to security and workflow issues. So on the one hand you had too much complexity (Vignette et al), but on the other too much simplicity (blogs, wikis).
Perhaps JotSpot is the product that can bridge the gap; and be the foundation of a true collaborative intranet. They certainly have the product and brainpower behind it to pull off that vision.
I’m only speculating at this point, as we know virtually nothing about what Google is hatching – other than what Andrew reported. But it’s very tempting to think that Google can ‘solve’ the long-standing corporate intranet problem!
