Trying out Google Sites

I've been playing with Google Sites lately and found it easy to set-up and customize. It is quite similar with the collaboration tools that we use at Orange and Bronze. Some thoughts...

• Subscribing to the site/pages in the site. What's great about this is you get notified by the changes that is happening to your project. I'm not sure if the one we are using could be tweaked to do this.
• Customized issue tracker. Yes, they do have this. You could easily add, delete and modify components of the issue tracker that you want. You can even add a deadline field which allows you to attach a date to a certain issue. However, you don't have the grouping of issues to milestone deadlines. Human error in giving a deadline past its milestone deadline is quite high. You also can't get reports as to how much of the issues in a particular milestone has been successfully resolved.
• Include Google Docs in your site. I liked this feature purely because of my documentation quirks. Since collaborators can edit the same document simultaneously, the changes are reflected in your site. You could also collaborate spreadsheets! Aside from that, you wouldn't have the problem of transferring tables from the wiki to a .doc file. I've tried this before and it was hell. I believe our PM/BA dept. will benefit from this feature.
• Uploaded docs are version controlled. Documents uploaded to the site are versioned automatically. What I didn't like is I can't download and upload multiple files. I was looking for a "Download all attachments" function, the one just like in Gmail, but I found none.
• Remind your team with the countdown feature. With these feature, it is easy to remind your teammates about an approaching deadline! What's just sad about this is even if the deadline has passed, the countdown is still there (just with a 0 days left notice).
• Announce what you want. The announcement page is similar to a collaboration of blogs. You don't need to go anywhere to share what you've done or learned with the project.
  

These are some of the features that I have checked out. I believe Sites is a good option for online document collaboration. Another colleague of mine have tried this out and wrote down his insights as well, do check it out. :)