WebProNews

Google has announced three new feaures in Google Sites for making gadgets more useful for Google Apps Premier Edition cusotomers. These are:

1. Start Page Template
2. Private Gadgets
3. End-to-End Security

With the Start Page template, site owners can allow individual users to personalize specific areas of the site, presumably similar to what users can do with iGoogle.

So, the site owner chooses "Start Page" in the page type menu, and then adds content that they want everyone to see to the top of the page. Then users can customize the page to see their own personal gadgets.

The private gadgets feature is pretty self-explanatory. It lets domain admins upload gadgets to Google Apps, and only members of the domain will be able to see and add the gadgets to their sites. They can be found in a directory with the domain name in the gadgets directory.

Gadgets will also now reflect the security of he site itself. This means that if your Google Site is encrypted, the gadget data will also be encrypted from the source code to the browser.

These features should spark more interest in Google Sites, because security and personalization are big draws.