Google looks to ease editing with Google Sites API

Google Inc. has a new API for Google Sites that should make it easier to add content and edit Web pages.

Google Labs is unveiling the new API for the company's Web page creation service. With it, content on Google Sites can be accessed and manipulated more easily.

Joining Google's family of 16 other Google Data APIs, this new protocol is designed to be fairly familiar looking to application developers.

“Now, all of your Google Site content can be accessed using the Google Data protocol,” wrote a Google spokesman in a blog post. “That means porting over an old Web page or backing up an existing Site got much easier.”

Ezra Gottheil, an analyst at Technology Business Research Inc., said that while the API is a significant enhancement for Google Sites, it's not going to be a deal maker for prospective users.

“Google is promoting Sites as a way to maintain internal Web sites for small companies and departments,” explained Gottheil. “If everything has to be entered by hand, even if it is every easy to do so, it's limiting. With the API, Google Sites becomes a content distribution tool. Content can be added to the site programmatically. Google is positioning it against SharePoint, leveraging the collaboration built into the Google Docs applications.”

Google has been working hard lately to get its foot in the enterprise door with Google Apps.

Just this week, Google announced that with Google Sync users can get their Gmail messages pushed directly to their mobile phones. That kind of instant awareness is a good draw for anyone trying to figure out whether Google, and Gmail in particular, have a place in the enterprise.

In another move to woo the enterprise, Google this summer unveiled Google Apps Synch for Microsoft Outlook, which is designed to let people use Microsoft Outlook, the software vendor's popular e-mail, calendar and contacts software, and then store the data in the Google Apps cloud infrastructure.

And at the beginning of August, Google went after Microsoft's ubiquitous Office applications with a month-long billboard ad campaign for its own online suite of enterprise office applications.