We use an internal wiki at our office. While I have used it very little, a lot of folks, especially our research team, use it on a regular basis. There's an effort and some what of a push to make it more user friendly and accessible to the rest of the office... I'm waiting to see how it goes.

I unfortunately have not used any of the Google apps so I won't be much of a help there.

Google calendar is great for organizing group activities and meetings.
I have also used google docs for shoring files.

As a project manager at a student run design build group at the University of Oregon we set up a google group to share files and send messages to our team. Worked pretty well and was free. This was especially great because we didn't have our own website or ftp server or anything.

I'm using Newforma on a project now--the workflow/interface is a bit wonky and not nearly as intuitive as uploading to Mediafire or the like.

Multiple files need to be uploaded as .zip, then you are given a tree structure of the files contained within the .zip file and can download each separately which is handy.

Newforma seems to be the go-to application. Anyone use Procore? http://www.procore.com/index.html

I use Google Apps and am very happy with most of the functions. Mail, Calendar and Documents work very well. I have also set up some sites to store information and resources.

For project work I think Google Sites's functionality is still very limited. While the interface is very simple, the handling of read/write permissions needs to be refined. Users can either read only or read/write but you cannot control these settings on a page-by-page basis. It also seems like you need to have full read/write permissions to leave comments - a major drawback.

mleitner, yup concur with your thoughts on that.

As a follow up, turns out that we own Microsoft Sharepoint and never deployed it because the principals didn't see enough of a need to go through the trouble. Well, when we went to the IT folks with our proposal for a web portal, they were practically salivating because they now had a rock solid reason to deploy this thing.

Getting into it now, its exactly what we needed. Not exactly the open source, grass-roots solution that would have made me yell hooray for the little guy, but since we already spent the money on this software, I'm glass we're finally using it.

On an aside, how many other folks find that their firms buy up technology solutions and never put them to good use?