The Battle between Google Sites and. MS Live

If you are the owner of a property management company, you have need to routinely communicate with your owner clients and have the need to provide them access to confidential information.  Historically, property managers have accomplished this task in one of two methods: either by sending the document via the United States mail, or by sending the document in an email, often containing secure PDF’s. The result of this solution is everyone now has way too much paper due to the mail and way too many electronic documents in their InBox.  

You have likely thought, there has to be a more efficient way.  Today, there is.  Today we have the ability to easily and quickly create hosted secure sites accessiable to only those people we want to provide access.  This allows the property manager to upload financial reports, pictures, as well as blog-like reports for clients into a single secure location.  The client accesses the information when they want it and they can subscripe to the site to receive automated announcements when documents are uploaded or changes made to the site.  All the property manager needs to do is upload the documents.  No email is necessary! The property manager saves time and money!

Most everyone by now has heard of Google Sites and MS Live.  Both Google and Microsoft have thrown their hats in the ring to attempt to garner your loyalty and choice of their solution for these private individual sites.  And, both companies have delivered their respective solutions consistent with their reputations.

MS LIVE, which was introduced first and earlier this year, is fashioned after a MS SharePoint site.  So, if you are familar with MS SharePoint, you will feel right at home.  SharePoint is a robust, rich program that creates internal Intranet sites for companies.  Most small companies don’t use it because it is resource intensive and expensive.  And while it is rich in features, that richness comes at a price.  The program is considered by many to be complicated and confusing.  And it is often buggy.  And so goes MS Live.  

There are many flaws for MS LIVE.  But he fatal flaw of MS LIVE is the registration process for your users.  They are required to have a LIVE ID or a .NET Passport.  And once they get it, which is a confusing process rittled with frustrations, they will probably end up in one of the many LIVE locations, but probably not your site - which is where they want to be.  One of the big problems with MS LIVE is there are too many parts to it and their names are too similar.  There is Business Live, the personal LIVE site, the Office Live and on and on and on. They have so many versions of basically the same product that it is impossible to keep track of them.

After hours and hours of the set up of multiple MS LIVE sites and paying for the extra users (you get 5 per site for free), we GAVE UP and bailed on MS LIVE.  And for the record, we wanted it to work.  First, all of the features are cool.  But we also wanted it to work because we had so much time into the project.  But in the end, it was clear we would be pushing our clients into a service that is just not yet ready for prime time.  

We have moved to a solution using GOOGLE Sites and GOOGLE Documents.  While the features are fewer, the sign up will not cause you to lose clients.  There are no charges for additional users and the features are sufficient for the average property management company.

So save yourself a LOT of time and skip MS LIVE.  If they ever get the sign up process simplified and the bugs out of the system, it may be worth another look.  But for now, you will get everything you need at GOOGLE Sites.  GOOGLE sites is free, currently void of advertising, and pretty simple to set up and use.  Plan on about an hour per client site for the basic set up.  

If you have had a different or similar experience, please share your thoughts.