Google Apps, Why use it?
The price is free, but no offline availability

The free suite of online applications from Google offers an alternative to the Microsoft universe and its Office productivity suite.
Adding some computers to the small business workplace entails making them useful for employees, while keeping the time to get people up to speed on them to a minimum. Google Apps may be helpful here.
In one swoop, a small business can add email, voice/text chat, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and a calendar to the enterprise. All for free, with support options and extra tools available for an annual per-user rate.
As long as the Internet connection stays up, Google Apps fulfills its role for computer users. What Google has not done is make an offline version of the service that would suit the roles of mobile workers like salespeople.
Help for that should be coming soon. "It's something we're actively working on solving," Google's Matt Glotzbach said in USA Today.
The short learning curve for Google Apps should please its adopters. For those looking for a richer feature set in a free set of productivity applications, small business people can choose traditional offline suites like OpenOffice or the relaunched Lotus Symphony for document needs.

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