Google Sites launches today - the result of the acquisition and subsequent integration of JotSpot, a hosted wiki provider. It promises to be a useful application, allowing organisations to pull together calendars, wiki-style websites, documents (through Google Docs) and so on into an intranet-style site. It will bring Google ease of use to the hitherto cumbersome process of creating a wiki and have the benefit of integrating other Google properties and services.

However, one major thing is missing, and that’s the ability to create a Google Site for anything other than a school or company. The login screen (shown here) asks for your “school or work email address”. What it means is “give us your domain name so we can figure out which Google Apps customer you’re part of.” All this new functionality is tied into the wider Google Apps family, which is designed for organisations which want Google to more or less provide hosted domain services.

There’s a logic to this, and if you’re an organisation using Google Apps already, you’ll want Sites to tap into that infrastructure. But what if you’re not using Google Apps already, and what if you’re an organisation other than a business or school, such as a charity, a sports team, a PTA or other similar entity? You won’t want to own or register a domain name, and the degree of integration you’ll need with other users will be minimal. You’ll still want to share calendars and news, create a website and use at least some of the other functions of Sites, but this won’t be possible for now:

Google Apps Team Edition is designed to help users easily collaborate with colleagues and classmates within their organizations. Because the service is intended for use within schools and businesses, you won’t be able to sign up using an individual email address, such as:

• user@gmail.com
• user@yahoo.com
• user@hotmail.com
• user@aol.com

If you wish to use Google services with your personal email address, we recommend creating a Google Account. Please note that if you’re using Gmail, you already have a Google Account and can add other services to this account. Google Accounts currently include all the services offered in Google Apps except for Google Sites - at this time Sites can only be used in Google Apps.

If you want to use Google Apps instead of a Google Account and you don’t have an email address issued by a school or business, you may wish to try Google Apps with domain registration.

In other words, the only way you can get around this at the moment is by registering a domain (with Google or otherwise) for the sole purpose of using Sites. This feels like a totally unnecessary imposition for an organisation which wants to use the functionality but doesn’t want a domain.

As an example, I work with other adults to run our Church congregation’s program for teenage boys. We use Google Docs to keep track of calendaring (ideally we’d use Google Calendar, and perhaps someday we will) and various other methods such as group emails and several Facebook groups to communicate with each other and the boys. How much easier would it be if we could centralise everything in Google Sites - calendars, announcements, the latest information on upcoming events and so on? But we can’t do it without registering a domain first. How frustrating. Hopefully Google will expand the availability to other groups soon.