Finally Gmail and Google Apps have offline access - Using Gmail, Calendar and Docs without an Internet connection – Official Gmail Blog. This is a major step, finally putting Gmail on a par with Microsoft Exchange & Outlook in all important respects.

Offline Gmail is a separate application with a simpler interface than online Gmail, but it seems functional and sufficient.

Background

The expensive Microsoft Office suite of desktop applications defines the standards for email, documents, spreadsheets and presentations. In the last few years Google has offered a set of web-based competitors – Google Apps - at a fraction of the cost. Now MS has now responded with its own web-based apps at a similarly low price level – Office 365.

To complicate things (Microsoft’s speciality)

• Office 365 is designed to work with the traditional Office desktop apps – and you need the latter for the collaborative tools.
• the collaborative tools were available to companies with SharePoint 2010, Office 2010 and the ability to run these expensive, complex products – Office 365 makes these enterprise products available to small & mid-sized companies.
• for our purposes we’re talking about Office 365 as a hosted service that you rent, but you can still get the Office 365 effect by running SharePoint on your own servers
• the Office 365 suite is more than described here, but for sanity we’ll focus on the core of it

So we’re comparing the new MS hybrid desktop/web apps with Google’s pure web apps.

The reasons to look at these products (compared to the desktop Office) are

• collaboration, allowing you to work at the same time as colleagues on documents
• access from any web browser, allowing you to work on documents from almost any computer you can get your hands on
• freedom from VPNs and other clumsy security hassles between mobile workers and documents
• lower costs, mainly thanks to Google setting an aggressively low price to pull the rug from under MS’s biggest earner

In my experience, collaboration is a huge advance and web access is nice to have; the drawback of many web apps is offline use.

Collaboration

Collaborative apps let you review a spreadsheet with your Australian office, make changes on the fly and see the effects. It lets several people work on a long report at once, or discuss edits over the phone. In daily use, they just make documents behave in an easier, more fluid way between teams.

The MS and Google collaborative models are fundamentally different:

• For Word and PowerPoint, MS uses a check-out / check-in approach. The only time two people can simultaneously work on the same Word doc is when both are using desktop Word rather than editing in browsers. Even then, they see others’ changes only when the other has manually saved and they then save. At that point, the user sees any conflicts where both have edited the same text – and get offered some quite intimidating manual steps to resolve the edits.
• For Excel, MS uses real-time collaboration
• Google uses real-time collaboration – you see almost instantly what the other users are writing.

My winner is Google. For most users who aren’t worried about reviewing every change made by other users this approach is transparent, seamless and so advanced as to seem magical.

For spreadsheets they’re equivalent, but for documents and presentations the MS approach is ugly - best suited to lawyers and other disciplined pros, difficult to use but capable of very fine control. (Google recently rewrote its doc editor from scratch and discussed the fiendish complexity of real-time text editing; I guess that MS hasn’t cracked it yet.)

Features and capabilities

This should be easy: Office 365 is far ahead of Google. Office famously has more features than any human can count. Further, don’t try running a huge dataset on Google Apps, or a complex financial analysis – a browser is no match for a desktop app (not yet – Google has therefore built its own browser and is working on making it as powerful as a desktop app…).

Except… I believe we spend too much time working the features at the expense of the core content. The greatest documents were written longhand and published in plain text; the best financial models fit on napkins. Google forces simplicity on users and you may find this an advantage.

My winner is Office 365, if you insist on frippery.

Document and knowledge management

Again, two very different approaches

• MS uses SharePoint, a highly customisable environment that stores files but also behaves like a web site with pages and functionality, so you can create an intranet around your documents – and more. As a result of its capabilities, it’s quite daunting and confusing to use.
• Google’s document manager is simple and intuitive: it stores files in folders.

If you can afford a specialist SharePoint manager or consultancy, and significant user training, you may find you can bend it to your needs – but first try Google Apps, possibly in conjunction with Google Sites, in case it’s sufficient.

One major caveat: Google Apps has a longstanding bug that makes it tricky to share folders with others, a fairly fundamental problem.

On that basis alone, my winner is Microsoft. When it’s fixed, Google.

Email

One could go on for a while on the differences between Gmail and Outlook/Exchange, but both are highly capable. One caution: if you’re switching either way, train your users first – we’ve seen them rebel against the new way of doing things (and that’s just our techies…).

Both winners.

Offline use

‘Offline’ meaning that you aren’t in the office and don’t have an internet connection.

Easy: neither of them work when you don’t have an internet connection. Sure, the Office desktop apps work, but you won’t have access to your files. If you really need to work offline – frequent fliers, etc – then try Dropbox or ask your IT department for “offline files”.

Conclusion

We at Conosco moved from the old desktop Office to Google 18 months ago. Collaborative documents have been transformative. Gmail has a few passionate adherents but the rest had plugged it into Outlook within a week.

Google Apps works. It’s simple, at the cost of being simplistic, it’s intuitive, and it has genuine real-time collaboration. If you can deal with the folder sharing bug, I highly recommend it.

Office 365 is highly capable on paper, offering the best of web and desktop apps, but it’s new and not all there, it’s unintuitive and clunky to use, and it’s more expensive than Google Apps (but not decisively so).

If you’re a startup, go Google – you don’t have time or money for complications. If you’re already using Office, have a look at Google Apps – if it’s not right then wait for Office 365 to mature, you don’t want to invest in getting SharePoint set up until you know it’s the platform for you.

End.

* Sorry Zoho, I know you were there first and have a broader range of apps but, given the significant advantages that both MS and Google bring to this game, it’s hard to justify looking at anyone else.

Refreshingly, he admits their support still isn’t up to scratch. Whether a computer science-driven company can learn customer service is the only real question over the technically excellent Apps products.

Microsoft has never bothered with end-user support, relying on resellers (like us) – which makes sense with software installed on customers’ computers, as the installation is often the problem.

Apple, selling consumer hardware, had to build a network of support staff in its stores as well as telephone support centres – and has succeeded far beyond any other customer products company in these. This is particularly creditable when you remember that Apple was a fairly small technical company learning how to do retail and customer services.

But “100% web-based” Google has no stores and the resellers (us again), not having access to the servers and software, are unable to do any deep troubleshooting. To succeed in Enterprise, Google has to reach the same standards of service support as Apple or the early days of Orange.

Whilst we at Conosco support highly capable server platforms for companies such as Moonpig, Anya Hindmarch and Cadogan Estates, we also try to keep startups’ cash in their pockets for as long as possible. This is a guide for startups who want enterprise-class IT which won’t cost much to set up but will scale painlessly.

Caution: I recommend an Apple Mac laptop… if you have any kind of Windows server infrastructure such as a domain controller or fileserver, as most larger businesses do, then a Mac is not painless (but still fine with a little savvy).

Add that to Google Voice (now launched in the US) and bye bye eFax’s business model.

Add a few tweaks and Google can take on the document management industry.

This is the first public outing for MS’s web versions of its dominant Office suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc). The idea of launching through Facebook is clever – a huge viral sharing network – but MS needs to look at Google Apps and understand why it works so well: it’s effortless, intuitive and almost invisible in ease of use.

MS might have more features, but losing your edits is a feature i’ll skip.

PS when I try to edit the doc again, it wrongly says it’s being edited by someone else.

‘Office Web Apps’ launches on May 12, alongside the new Office 2010 desktop software suite. As a business, you’ll need a SharePoint 2010 server to use them or an equivalent hosted service (we’re expecting more info on the latter in the next few days) – a bit of a shame as SharePoint needs a lot of investment to be any use, more than a small business can afford. Consumers will get the web apps through Windows Live or Facebook Docs.

The web apps are extensions of your desktop files – you can’t feasibly abandon the desktop apps yet. They offer viewing and limited editing, but the limitations are likely to confuse and frustrate users.

For now, we’re huge fans of Google Apps – a rapidly maturing service that is complete, consistent and highly useful in its pure online form.

There’s another factor that Blodget misses: Google Apps is viral. Its online collaboration features allow multiple users to work on the same documents and spreadsheets at the same time. When you invite others to help on a doc, you’re making them Apps users. And the product is so easy and powerful they’ll soon infect others.

As Blodget says

Google Apps, in other words, still look like a classic disruptive technology.  And in their path is a massive Microsoft cash cow, one that accounts for more than half of Microsoft’s profit.

Google has a two pronged approach for enterprises moving to the Cloud. Google Apps has packaged applications like Gmail, calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, Video, and other commonly used applications. Enterprises can get immediate cost savings by moving these routine every day applications to the cloud, and free up IT resources to focus on more strategic issues.

Google AppEngine provides a custom development environment and scalable deployment infrastructure. Enterprise developers can build custom applications using the same systems that power Google applications, with built-in scalability leveraging things like BigTable and GFS.

At Conosco, we steer our small & mid-sized IT support customers away from any form of custom development – it rarely makes any sense for them. But the Apps suite is increasingly attractive, especially for startups, and it’s easy to move over to it gradually as Don says.

Microsoft is pursuing its “software plus services” strategy, which means desktop applications still play an important role. The email is Exchange-based, so you can use other email clients, but only Outlook on Windows will deliver full features. Document collaboration is based primarily on cloud storage rather then editing, though when Office Web Apps appear next year users will have some lightweight editing tools.

Google on the other hand is primarily web based, with desktop support as an add-on. Google has the lead when it comes to online document editing, since it has had Google Docs for some time, whereas Office Web Apps are still in beta. Google has no bias towards Windows and Office. With Google, a document’s primary existence is in the cloud, although you can export and import with possible loss of data or formatting.

Something else I noticed is that Google has big plans for integration with mobile devices, whereas Microsoft seems mainly concerned with Exchange synchronisation.

Microsoft’s pitch is that if you live in Windows anyway, with Exchange and SharePoint on the server, and Windows and Office on the client, then its cloud service integrates nicely. Google on the other hand is more revolutionary, not caring about what you run as long as you can connect to its services.

Although the software plus services idea has attractions, it sounds more like a transitional strategy than one for the long term. Over time, as the web platform gets more powerful, and as rich internet applications take over from pure desktop applications, the services part will grow absolutely dominant.