Barb Mosher has written a great summary at CMS Wire on Google's new Sites API which allows content owners to move content in and out Google Sites. As Mosher points out, this new API and some additional tools will allow content owners to "pull stuff out of SharePoint and place it into Google Sites" which is sure to bring "real heat between Redmond and Mountain View" in their quest for customers.
Until now, content and data inside Google Sites stayed inside Google Sites. And there was no easy way to migrate additional content and data into it. With the introduction of the Google Sites Data API, that has changed.
The API support almost all of the functionality currently available within Google Sites including:
- Retrieve, create, modify, and delete pages and content.
- Upload/download attachments.
- Review the revision history across a site.
- Display recent user activity.
Which brings us to the point. With these new capabilities, you can now not only move data out of Google Sites, but you can move data into Google Sites and possibly out of other similar applications, like SharePoint.
Whether Google Sites and the new API will be a threat to Microsoft and SharePoint is questionable. But, once again I think these type of events emphasize that those content management systems that get the most attention from us these days are those applications that open up and work with other third party applications.
There is a reason why such topics as CMIS, open source, and API are in the spotlight with folks interested in content management. No one really wants to be stuck with a vendor that doesn't play well with others. It just strategically isn't a good idea to have your content controlled by a single vendor, so why do it? I suppose I'm rhetorically asking that question to both customers and vendors.