Google Sites vs. SharePoint Online: The Battle for Enterprise Collaboration (Oct. 2009)

Microsoft’s first-step in realizing its Software + Services [1] vision is the launch of its traditional productivity suite in SaaS form under the banner of Microsoft Online Services. Designed to thwart any penetration that Google Apps sees in the Enterprise market, Microsoft’s Online Services includes the all-inclusive Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) bundle or SharePoint Online [2], Exchange Online, Office Communication Online and Office Live Meeting each as individual offerings.

High-availability, comprehensive security and simplified IT management are the hallmarks of both Google Apps and Microsoft Online Services. For this particular post, we focus specifically on the collaboration aspect of each suite and offer a side-by-side comparison of SharePoint Online vs. Google Sites:

	SharePoint Online	Google Sites
Internet Scenarios	No	Yes
Custom Domain	No	Yes
Code Extensibility	No (Custom WebParts Not Permitted)	Yes (via Gadgets Extensibility)
API for List Data	Yes	Yes – via new Sites API
Page-Level Meta Tags	?	No
Basic Workflow	Yes	No
Annual Fee/User	$87	$50
Storage per User	250Mb	10Gb+500Mb/User per Domain [6]
Sites per Domain	20	Unlimited
Quota per Site	50 Gb	None – Tracked per Domain
Max File Size	250 Mb [7]	50 Mb
Ability to purchase additional storage?	Yes (per TB increments)	No
E-commerce Integration	No	Yes (via Google Checkout and 3rd-party services like PayPal)

In the SharePoint Online trial, we note that the Publishing Site template typically used for public-facing deployments is absent from the list of available templates; the choices are: Basic Meeting Workspace, Blank Site, Blog, Document Workspace, Team Site, and Wiki Site.

Aside from the handicap around public-facing scenarios (more on this below) the bulk of the standard WSS collaboration facilities continue to be available in their natural form, including: extendible lists, user-defined views, WebParts, search, alerts, and so on. The atomic “list” structure that the SharePoint franchise thrives on is indeed a powerful concept that provides tremendous value to self-serve audiences; that it’s preserved in its entirety is certainly promising for the SaaS offering.

Meanwhile, when creating pages in Google Sites, your template choices are:

The all-powerful list concept that SharePoint excels in has rudimentary support here:

Users are limited to a handful of column types with no flexibility around validation, user-defined views, folders and lookup capabilities:

Contrasting this with the 12 column types available in WSS, each with unique validation and configuration options, the edge goes to SharePoint; but both offer the basic structures needed for self-serve collection needs.

And while Google Sites does offer rudimentary lists, it currently has no support for accessing this data via APIs as documented here earlier; SharePoint, on the other hand, continues to offer a broad range of externally accessible services for retrieving its data [5]. With Google Sites, your only immediate options are to host the data in spreadsheet format. (Update: the October, 2009 announcement of the import/export API for Sites changes this analysis.)

It’s clear that Microsoft intentionally abandoned the public-facing scenarios in its first version – those looking for a mixture of internal and external sites need to look elsewhere. And while Google hasn’t done so explicitly, they’ve also not demonstrated much interest in servicing this market either, particularly with the omission of features like page-level meta tags [4].

(Update: the July 25, 2009 announcement [8] of custom faveicon support for Google Sites is certainly a small step towards allowing deeper customizations needed for internet-facing scenarios.)

Microsoft, for its part, acknowledges the limitations in the first version and plans to address them (courtesy of David Gorbert [3]):

“Thanks for your suggestion about using SharePoint online for anonymous Internet use. Right now SharePoint Online is targeted to intranet-type applications like internal portals and collaboration and requires authentication. On-premises SharePoint is used for many applications that go beyond portals and collaboration both in the intranet and on the Internet. In fact, hosting Internet-facing sites with SharePoint is one of the fastest-growing on-premises uses of the product. For SharePoint Online we are looking at all the scenarios where SharePoint is used and will be adding functionality to the service to enable many more of these scenarios over time.

Regarding using your own domain name for non-anonymously-accessible sites, this is complicated by the fact that we use SSL (to protect your data) and would therefore need a server certificate to host your domain name. Current Internet standards make this difficult for large-scale hosters to do, but there is a (relatively) new extension to the standards called SNI that could help with this. This is a common request, and so we will be looking at ways to enable this as well.

Regarding connecting online and on-premises SharePoint deployments, it is possible to do this via SharePoint Online’s Web Services. Several of Microsoft's partners offer tools to help with this (e.g. Metalogix Site Migration Manager), or if you have a special scenario you can write custom integration solutions specific to your need. Troy Hopwood on my team demonstrated this recently at PDC. If you have specific online/on-premises integration scenarios, we’d love to hear them. For SharePoint Online the best way to continue the conversation is to post your questions and ideas in the SharePoint Online forum at http://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/onlineservicessharepoint/threads. SharePoint Online folks monitor this forum daily and we try to get back to you as quickly as possible.”

With the release of SharePoint 2010 keeping the team busy, the “when” is certainly an important question. Having to chose between these offerings for immediate external-facing needs (today), the edge would have to go to Google despite the feature deficit.

Update #1: On a related note, a list of  top 10 applications running on Google’s App Engine:
http://blog.stringbuffer.com/2009/05/top-10-most-popular-sites-running-on.html

Update #2: A big thanks to SM Rana for bringing the HyperOffice comparison to my attention; I mostly agree with the analysis, with just a couple of  minor exceptions:

#1. Shared Documents: Not only is the offline access for Google Apps severely handicapped, but you can’t really compare document capabilities in GA with Office – the edge goes to Microsoft here by a landslide.

#2. On the sites/intranet front: Mixed feelings here. When SharePoint Online does allow code deployment, it will gain a significant advantage over Google Sites. On the other hand, if GA offers customized lists and storage, and you start to see a flourishing ecosystem of gadgets, both commercial and community-driven, then the playing field will be levelled somewhat. Again, the debate here is largely based on the same principles as the App Engine vs. Azure contest: developer appeal, familiarity, leverage of assets, and existing channel/partners will be the differentiators.

References:

[1] – Software + Services
http://www.microsoft.com/softwareplusservices/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/aa699384.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_plus_services

[2] – SharePoint Online
http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-cms/sharepoint-online-saas-review-what-it-is-and-isnt-004351.php
http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-20/microsoft-offers-sharepoint-online-service-to-the-world-004058.php

[3] – Anonymous Access, Custom URLs and Online/On-Premise Connectivity
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/onlineservicessharepoint/thread/a08874ee-88eb-4c45-a2df-e9907659adf1

[4] – Is it possible to add metadata, such as keywords and a description, to a page?
http://www.google.com/support/sites/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=90546

[5] – SharePoint Online Web Services
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/onlineservicessharepoint/thread/d3327a40-979a-4f92-a702-9a8a6762f49f

[6] – How much storage do I have in Google Sites?
https://www.google.com/support/sites/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96770

[7] – Increase for SharePoint Online File Uploads
http://blogs.technet.com/msonline/archive/2009/07/01/service-update-july-2009-release-availability-features-announced.aspx

[8] – Google Sites Updates: July 15, 2009
http://sites.google.com/site/gsunhelp/google-sites-news/googlesitesupdatesjuly152009