The struggle to collaborate continues. You want to create a place to share, but you don’t want to sacrifice control. How do you open up the potential for sharing, without letting the inmates run the asylum?

Now you have another option with Google Sites. This offering is the newest element of functionality from the online office toolset called Google Apps (that we mentioned in Close the loop). This application makes it easy to create a shared website, so you can provide people with up-to-date access to information. You can invite team members to add file attachments, incorporate information from other Google applications (documents, calendar, videos, images) and also create new content. What’s really different here is that this tool puts basic site development into the hands of just about anyone. if you can manage MS Word or MS Powerpoint, then you can use this tool to create sites and then publish them either to your intranet or to the web.

You should be happy to hear that usage options range from free to $50 / year, depending on your level in Google Apps. If you’re looking to create a small site for your team that you want to let everyone use and edit - here’s an interesting option.