JotSpot users: mixed feelings about Google Sites

JotSpot users and developers are torn about Google’s relaunch of the hosted wiki service  Wednesday under the name Google Sites as part of the Google Apps hosted suite.

On the one hand, they are relieved that JotSpot is alive and that its technology wasn’t discarded or taken apart and plugged into existing products. This had been a concern in the JotSpot community during the 16 months of silence and uncertainty that followed Google’s acquisition of JotSpot  in October 2006. At that time, the wiki company, founded in 2004, had a vibrant community of commercial developers and thousands of business customers.

Still, users and developers are concerned by the lack of an API for Google Sites and the limited information Google has offered about migration paths and backwards compatibility between the services.

“From our perspective as JotSpot developers, there’s some disappointment that the API isn’t available to create more sophisticated applications with the product,” said Michael Dressler, partner at The Last Mile Group , which builds custom online community applications for businesses. “In that respect, this represents a step back from where JotSpot was when it was acquired.”

At one point, JotSpot-based wikis represented the majority of application development work at The Last Mile Group. However, that has dropped to less than 20 percent due to the uncertainty that clouded JotSpot after the acquisition. The Last Mile Group has diversified into developing for other platforms, like the ones from Jive Software, CustomerVision and Social Platform. It even rebranded its JotXPert development service to the broader, non-vendor-specific CommunityXPerts name.

“I’d assume that at some point Google will release an API for Google Sites and make it available for third-party developers and that underneath it will still have the same level of [JotSpot] functionality,” Dressler said. In the meantime, The Last Mile Group feels it will be very limited in what it can do as a commercial developer with Google Sites, which the company has just started to examine, he said.

The API is also in the mind of Deb Adair, a freelance technical writer . Adair created and maintains two JotSpot sites, including one for a horse riding academy for which she built some custom applications using the API. “The lack of an API is definitely a concern going forward for that site,” said Adair, who wrote developer documentation for JotSpot prior to the Google acquisition.

Meanwhile, at InCircuit Development , a maker of enterprise asset management software, there is some concern about what Google’s plan is for migrating JotSpot wikis to Google Sites.

InCircuit uses JotSpot for its intranet and for coordinating software customization projects with clients, said Nicholas Cancelliere, who Thursday began manually moving portions of the wikis to Google Sites, in part to test out the new service. He hopes Google will soon provide more information not only about migration but also that it will clarify what JotSpot features and applications will carry over to Google Sites and which ones will not.

Echoing a common complaint, Cancelliere said that Google’s communication with the JotSpot community has been very limited, and that he hopes to see that change now. “That has been part of my frustration since the acquisition,” said Cancelliere, who is business analyst and project manager specialized in the Scrum software development method at InCircuit.

When Google acquired JotSpot, it closed off new account registrations for it. Google continued supporting existing JotSpot customers, but they sometimes complained about hosting outages and performance problems and about lack of responsiveness for technical support queries.

Google spokesman Andrew Kovacs said via e-mail that providing a Google Sites API is “definitely” something Google wants to do, but it doesn’t have a timeline to share yet for delivering it.

“We value [JotSpot users’ and developers’] support, and are doing everything we can to ensure they can get their information into Google Sites in a simple and easy way as soon as possible,” Kovacs said.

Google will not automatically migrate JotSpot wikis over to Google Sites, but it will provide users with an automated, one-click migration feature, Kovacs said. Google also plans to provide “detailed documentation” about migration when the technology is released, so that JotSpot users can see, for example, what will change and what will be new when moving to Google Sites, he said. Google officials said Wednesday that they hope that eventually all JotSpot wikis will move to Google Sites.

As part of Google Apps, a suite of hosted collaboration and communication applications, Google Sites , like JotSpot, is designed to allow teams within an organization to easily create Web sites to collaborate on projects.

Teams can embed a variety of files and content from other Google applications and services, including video clips from YouTube, images from Picasa and Apps’ spreadsheets, text documents, presentations and calendars. JotSpot has its own set of core applications, plus those built by external developers.

Despite the current uncertainty and unanswered questions, those interviewed said they were grateful to at least see Google moving forward with JotSpot. “I’m excited. It’s been a long time coming,” Cancelliere said.

Like Cancelliere, Adair found Google Sites very intuitive to use. She was able to build a site with it very quickly. “It was very easy to set up. I’ll give them that,” said Adair. She also liked that Google Sites’ look-and-feel is very similar to JotSpot’s.

“It’s encouraging to see Sites announced. It didn’t happen as fast the JotSpot community would have hoped, but it’s a step in the right direction,” she added.

Meanwhile, Dressler is confident that Google will prioritize opening up Sites’ platform to third-party developers. “It seems to be Google’s basic strategy to deliver access to APIs of their applications. We hope that’ll be true in the Sites product as well,” Dressler said.