Google is rolling out the new Google Sites for G Suite customers, will kill old version later

Google today announced that the new version of the Google Sites service for easily creating websites is now becoming available for all G Suite (formerly known as Google Apps for Work) customers to use. Google unveiled the redesign in June and only made it available to companies that were accepted for an early adopter program.

The new version of Google Sites is enabled by default, but end users will only be able to use it if Google Drive and the previous version of Google Sites are both already enabled. In Google’s release terminology, the change is launching now in the rapid release track, and it will become available for end users in the scheduled release track on November 21. On the admin side, it’s launching now. For G Suite Government customers, the new Google Sites won’t be available, at least not at this time.

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For now, the older version of Google Sites will remain available as Google adds all of its capabilities to the new version. In 2017, Google will “provide and recommend options to migrate your sites from the classic Sites to the new Sites,” Google said in a blog post. “Beginning in 2018, we’ll send a timeline and instructions regarding the gradual process to shut down the classic Sites.”

Google hasn’t yet chosen the date at which it will kill the previous version of Google Sites. But Google says that it will tell customers at least a year in advance.

If your company is already invested in the Google cloud services world — instead of or in addition to, for one, Microsoft productivity suite — this tool will be fairly easy to integrate with, and because this new version is collaborative like Google Docs, it’s certainly interesting. All files associated with new Google Sites pages are stored in Google Drive.

More information on the new Google Sites is here.