Using Google Sites to create a useful small-business intranet

I own Western Ascent Inc. - a small web-developement company located in Fort Collins, CO.

Today I read the news that JotSpot had been relaunched under Google Sites and saw that the Google Apps and Docs were able to be embedded into the web pages.

I have already switched our email to gmail via Google Apps, and wondered what useful tool I could cobble together using Google Sites. When I saw the fact that you can embed forms from Google Docs into pages on Google Sites, and limit site access to members of your domain, I thought I would put together a little time-tracking application to test an idea I had.

I have been using Base Camp for quite a while now to manage projects and track time for our small team of developers and designers. It is generally useful, but I am not in love with it - meaning that if I find an adequate replacement for less money (or free) I will happily move on.

So far, I think my time-tracker is working well and I can see how the sites and access control can allow me to create "extranets" for client projects that will allow us to share files and ideas with clients - which, along with time tracking - is our primary use for Base Camp.

I will try and put together a quick tutorial of how I created our little intranet and how I made a form that all our employees are already using to track time on projects.