Build Company Intranet Portals with Google Sites

Introduction To Google Sites

Simon Mukabana
Pawa IT Solutions
5 min readJul 4, 2019

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Google Sites is an application that is part of Google’s G Suite, which is a premium package of Google applications that have been optimized for use by businesses. Other applications that are included are Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar and more. Google Sites allows you to create a website without having to know how to code it yourself. It falls under the Collaborative category in G Suite, meaning that you can get other Google users in on the website creation process too, which is what makes it so powerful and such a valuable tool for teams.

Passive and Available Communication Google Sites is all about passive communication — the kind of information that is ready and available without having to pick up a phone or email someone. That is why a social, dynamic Google Sites intranet is crucial to the G Suite organization because it fosters the communication through forums, web conferences and news feeds.

One of the best things about Google Sites is the plethora of other Google Apps services you can tie into your company intranet. Your web space will be a constant source of fresh information to your workmates. Intranets are meant to be living and growing organisms that serve as a sort of one-stop-shop for finding documents, contacts and the latest news

What makes Google Sites a great intranet platform?

  • It’s all about the G Suite integration; Google Sites is the best intranet platform because it has all the connectivity to the G Suite. Your organization uses applications like Gmail, Calendar and Drive every day. Imagine adding a Google Calendar to show your upcoming meetings, embedding a spreadsheet-driven chart and finding that elusive vacation request form. Google Sites is designed to make this the simplest process ever. You can bring everything together in a wiki, a hub, an intranet, whatever you want to call it.
  • No Code; Working on your intranet with Google sites is as easy as Editing a document. You add/insert text, images, videos , change fonts, size, layout, just as you would when editing a document.
  • Publish with a click , share like A doc; Publishing and hosting is not difficult at all with Google Sites. It’s really as simple as the click of a button, namely: “Publish”. All of a sudden your site can be found online! But only by the people you want, because sharing in google site works just like in the rest of Google Drive: you can choose who can see it, even selecting a whole domain.
mobile responsive
  • Mobile Ready/Adaptive; As a mobile first economy, most of the staff and employees want a responsive and mobile adaptive intranet. Luckily, Google sites achieves this without any need to worry or hire a designer to adapt this. Don;t take our word, take a look at our demo site below previewed on mobile
  • Secure; The whole aim of an intranet is to restrict access to only “internal staff” and authorized staff. Google Sites allows you to do just that. By Restrict Access and only allow users to Authenticate with your G Suite Account, you have no need to worry about unauthorized personal “snooping” on your internal affairs.

What are the Google Sites benefits for intranet?

Google Apps Integration Connectivity with the applications you use every day, including Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Maps, and more

Great user experience It is important for company buy-in to create an intranet that is easy to navigate, looks great and functions exactly how you need it to.

Intuitive security and access permissions Granular page-level permissions keep your intranet private for your Google Apps users. Single sign-on makes it easy to access, yet very secure. Assign owners, editors, and viewers.

Easy to use and maintain No HTML coding required, editing and updating the intranet is like using a Word doc. It doesn’t take much training to get this off the ground.

Customized for your company Branding is very important and it’s a great idea to carry the look and feel of your public website through to your intranet. A well designed and consistent presentation will encourage participation

What makes Google sites Intranet a good solutions that provide value to your business

  1. Delivering collaboration tools: A google sites intranet platform with deep integration with G suite services such as Docs, Calendars, google drive, sheets etc enables centralized access to tools and information employees need to perform their jobs.
  2. Corporate communications: Since and intranet is an organization’s digital hub, the upper management can broadcast important information throughout the organization-changes at the corporate level, important company events, recognition of performers and announcements related to new policies
  3. Internal communications; Google sites intranet include all communication tools employees need to keep in touch within and across teams to get their jobs done.Some of them include forums, forms that can be used by employees to request for services e.g leave applications, employee assessment etc
  4. Internal support: Google intranets will allow large organizations to easily manage their query calls from employees. Company with widespread operations have technical and coordination difficulties on a daily basis, which lead to a constant flow of query calls. Intranets are the best tools to manage and gather these calls and request in an organized, secure way.
  5. Information repository: With Google intranets, very sensitive documentation and know how can be stored for access- like HR policies, Training materials for all departments, Reports and more .

Sample Intranet Portal ;https://sites.google.com/pawait.co.ke/demo/ .

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Simon Mukabana
Pawa IT Solutions

Snr Cloud Architect @ Incentro | GCP, Cloud Migration, IaC, Cloud security, DevOps, SRE