Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Google gears up for offline Apps

January 28, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Google gears up for offline Apps

TAGS: Google

Beat to the offline punch enabled by its own Google Gears technology, Google appears on the verge of leveraging Gears to enable users of its Google Apps online productivity suite to work on documents and spreadsheets while not connected to the Net.

Ever illuminating the guts of the search giant's wares, Tony Ruscoe of Google Blogoscoped stumbled across experimental offline access to Docs while "playing around with one of Google's not-so-private experimental sites."

Although Ruscoe was able to rename and star documents while offline, the crown jewel of the proposed functionality, being able to actually view and edit documents, lays in wait. This functionality is an essential component to any serious push to unseat Microsoft Office as king of productivity in the enterprise.

Even when the functionality is present, however, a lack of business-grade service-level agreements and increasing security concerns will remain significant impediments to widespread Google Apps enterprise adoption.

Gears, the technology that will eventually fuel Google Apps' future offline capabilities, was first put to use by Google Apps competitor Zoho, a move Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering at Google, cheered as a victory for the Web as a platform, and thus for Google itself.

Google has implemented Gears into its Google Reader, the synching capabilities of which are reminiscent of what Ruscoe uncovered in this experimental Docs iteration, as he points out.

In other recent Blogoscoped sightings of highly anticipated Google functionality, Ruscoe uncovered a Google Sites-related icon in a stylesheet, suggesting Google's proposed integration of Wiki capabilities obtained in its now long-ago purchase of JotSpot may also be around the corner.

Additional resources
Thin vs. Fat: Google’s plan to kill Microsoft Office
Google security under fire
Google revs up security play

Posted by Jason Snyder on January 28, 2008 04:44 PM

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