Last week there were dozens of reviews of Google Sites, a brand new addition to their Applications suite. Yet, as I went through article after article, I couldn’t find the answers I wanted. My big questions….

What is it? And who can best use it for what? Other related questions I couldn’t find answers to included is it yet another Content Management System, will it work for non-techies and is it any good? Eventually it became obvious that I’d just have to try it out. And that’s what I’ve been doing this weekend.

30 hours into this, I can see why others have trouble defining it. While the name is “Sites,” it’s not an all-purpose website authoring tool. It’s more of a website niche tool — albeit it a big niche. The niche is using the web for collaboration, particularly for projects and work groups. Google says it’s for easy creation of team websites. For example, it could be a terrific tool for co-authors, an illustrator and editors to use in managing the production of a book. Or a small business could use it as an intranet — making announcements, keeping a general calendar, and gathering boilerplate or template files in one place.

In its current early form it’s set up to do eight things.

1. Share internally. While you can open your site up to the world, it’s designed particularly for people with the same email address to use together. Typically this means a small business email address — not a large organization like vanderbilt.edu and certainly not generic email accounts like comcast.net and gmail.com.

2. Add simple web pages. You don’t have to know HTML to do this. It’s much like adding pages to a blog.

3. Gather related files into a page (called a “file cabinet”). This strikes me as one of Site’s most useful features. It’s easy to imagine ways to gather documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, graphics, and other file formats in one place defined by the project at hand.

4. Integrate announcements into the site. You can have a page of announcements and then display summaries with links on the home page.

5. Add Google Gadgets. The plethora of Google Gadgets available for iGoogle is available to a Google Site too. This opens up lots of possibilities for designing Google Gadgets to use collaboratively.

6. Create lists to track projects.

7. Integrate with other Google Apps. The other “apps” typically include documents, calendar, and chat.

8. Search the site the way only Google can do.

Technically, the software used to write this was a Wiki. But thank heavens they don’t intimidate people by saying that anywhere in Google documentation. Even better, it doesn’t use any of those peculiar Wiki markups. So in my opinion it’s not a Wiki, even if it once was.

You might have noticed I haven’t answered all of my own questions yet. I will do that in upcoming posts, as I continue to pick apart the who, what, how and why of Google Sites.