Umair's Blog: Import, export, and more with the new Google Sites API

Friday, 25 September 2009

Import, export, and more with the new Google Sites API

One of the benefits of Google Apps is the extensibility and openness of the platform. Today we're pleased to advance that story by introducing a new API for Google Sites in Labs.

The use cases are plentiful for businesses:

Update Google Sites from 3rd party applications – e.g. your sales team's Google Sites pages can update automatically when new leads are added to your CRM system.
Migrate files and content from workspace applications like Microsoft SharePoint and Lotus Notes to Google Sites.
Export Google Sites pages, edit them offline, and re-import the updated content.
Export your sites, including every page revision, for backup.
Easily monitor changes across your important internal and public sites, all from a single gadget.
Push new content like changes to employee policies or a new corporate logo to any site on your domain, even sites created by individual employees.
Best of all, while this API is brand new, application developers will find it rather familiar – it is, after all, a Google Data API. And like our 16 other Google Data APIs, this one comes with all the standard protocol support around authentication and querying that you'd expect. You'll find everything you need to get started on the Google Code pages, including links to documentation and sample applications.

For those of you interested in applications already built on top of this API, be sure to look at:

The open source import/export project on Google Code that lets you export entire sites as static HTML, maintaining the structure and page hierarchy.
SharePoint Move for Google Apps, a product developed by LTech for migrating data and content from Microsoft SharePoint to Google Sites.

We're looking forward to your feedback! Watch this space for updates to the API in the coming months.