Many companies are beginning to integrate their web sites with those of industry leaders, such as Google and Yahoo, taking advantage of free tools that add value and functionality to their services.

I am not talking about providing better search facilities, or even adding maps to help customers find the office, neither of which are likely to make much difference to the bottom line. Rather, these companies are building public web sites that use Flickr to store the photos that appear on their pages, and extranets that allow users to draw routes on top of Google maps.

Although image storage is something that many firms could handle with only a small amount of internal development, every IT manager has to ask the question, “Why am I doing this when someone else could do it for me?”.

Obvious problems to the in-house approach are the cost of back-end storage and the complexity of the software needed to allow members of the public to log in and upload photos. Sorting this out is not a huge task in terms of software development but it does raise questions about privacy, security and copyright. So while the development cycle may be small, it is a mammoth project to keep going once everything is up and running.

Flickr removes this maintenance burden by allowing people to log in and store photographs on its servers. By providing external image storage for a third-party site, it removes almost all of the complexity, instructing users to upload pictures to Flickr and tag them with suitable keywords.

Not only does Flickr handle the technology workload of storage and logins, it also takes responsibility for privacy and security. Meanwhile, with the help of some simple JavaScript, the third-party site automatically finds photographs tagged with the appropriate keywords and puts them in the right place on its web pages.

The routing extranet uses the same idea of building on the foundations laid by industry leaders. In this case, the organisation needs to allow various people to layout road routes that can then be viewed on its public web site.

The solution is an extranet site with some clever client-side code that allows users to click on Google maps to create route maps. The maps are stored on a server so it is easy enough to make a new URL for the public web site that leads to a non-editable version of the map.

One of the best things about this solution is that Google’s maps are free to use, can be easily zoomed and printed, and users can easily switch between the different views available, including the satellite and hybrid map/satellite views.

Any organisation that can develop a similar solution using in-house developers in under a year deserves a medal; and even if they could, how much would it cost by comparison?

Meanwhile, a peep at the source code for any web site will tell you if they are plugged into such free resources yet.

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‹ roger@rogerh.com