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Google Wave, the maddeningly confusing yet highly innovative real-time collaboration tool, will become a member of Google's online office suite Google Apps later this year. The service, still in closed beta, is meant to be a modern-day revamp of email - what email would be if it was invented in 2009 instead of the 1960's. Yet the interface, a mashup of email, chat, and collaborative document editing, left many early adopters with mixed feelings about the product...at least in its current form. Called "unproductive," "complex," and "overwhelming" by the same people who usually embrace new technologies, it seems an odd choice to add the still-developing Wave service to the Google Apps line-up at this time. But Google has confirmed they will do exactly that.

When Google announced an upgrade to their Google Docs service earlier this month, a company blog post also mentioned several third-party applications which can help make the transition to the online service easier. With these apps, you can transfer and synchronize your local files to Google Docs without having to upload them one-by-one. But which application is right for you?

We took a look at the options Google suggested and have summarized the features, drawbacks and pricing information below. In addition, we also reviewed one other application not specifically mentioned in the Google blog post that may be of use to those moving to the cloud-based service.

A recent bug in Google Apps allowed students at several colleges to read each other's email messages and some were even able to see another student's entire inbox. The issue occurred at a small handful of colleges, admitted Rajen Sheth, senior product manager for Google Apps, but he declined to say how many other institutions were affected. However, according to Donald Tom, director of IT for support services at Brown University, one of the institutions undergoing the transition, he got the impression that a total of 10 schools faced the problem.

While the glitch itself was minor and was fixed in a few days, the real concern - at least at Brown - was with how Google handled the situation. Without communicating to the internal IT department, Google shut down the affected accounts, a decision which led to a heated conversation between school officials and the Google account representative.

Google just announced that it will open up Google Wave to a large number of Google Apps users this fall. According to the announcement, Google will first open up access for some schools and businesses and plans to bring Wave to all Google Apps users next year. Google Apps administrators can now sign up for Google Wave accounts here. Google had already announced that it would hand out about 100,000 Wave accounts on September 30th and this looks to be the first step towards this.

Today at its Wordwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, Microsoft announced that the Microsoft Office suite has reached the 'technical preview' milestone, and that starting today the company will open up the Office beta program to a larger number of users. While a new version of Office is obviously big news for a lot of users, the really interesting part of the announcement is that Microsoft is also releasing more details about the Office Web applications - which are lightweight, browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote (Microsoft's note-taking tool). Beta testers can expect invites for the Office Web applications to go out in August.

"I think of this as a love story," began Chris Vander Mey, Senior Product Manager at Google, as he announced Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, a plug-in that syncs Outlook with Apps, much like Outlook syncs with Exchange.

But love? Not so much. Google, intent on building its enterprise channel, has recognized that many Outlook users - particularly enterprise users - aren't ready to make the leap to the cloud and to Google Apps. But maybe, just maybe, Google Apps Sync is what it will take to woo them.

In the earliest days of the Internet, getting an .edu email address and signing in to Pine for the first time was a rite of passage for many college freshmen. Now, however, virtually every new college student got an email address before even graduating from primary school. Because of this, a number of schools are now considering phasing out email hosting for their students altogether. According to a recent report (PDF), 20% of American colleges already outsource their email systems to commercial providers, and more plan to do so in the future.

Just last week, Google announced offline support for Gmail, and today, Google Calendar is also finally getting a similar upgrade. Google Apps users are the first to get access to this new feature, though we assume that Google will roll this out to all of its users soon. The offline feature was built on top of Google Gears, which is available for Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Google tonight announced a reseller and accreditation program for Google Apps. Resellers, after being trained by Google, can now market, support, and customize Google Apps Premier Edition for their customers. Resellers will get training and support from Google, as well as tools for sales, marketing, and integrating Google Apps into their customers' existing architectures. Google has already rolled out a pilot of this program to more than 50 partners worldwide.

In July of this year, Google finally gave webmail users a way to make sure that Gmail always used SSL - the protocol that encrypts connections to prevent hijacking. Through a flip of switch in Gmail's settings, users could rest assured that their email was at least less vulnerable, if not totally secure from hackers. However, Gmail is not the only Google-based web application where you may be storing personal data. Your files stored in Google Docs should be protected, too. But are they?

With a US presidential campaign in full swing and a current president at his term limit, the world is prepared for changes in Washington, DC. But abandoning Microsoft Office?

Enter the dark horse Google Apps - the new platform for day-to-day business operations in DC - now that Vivek Kundra, Chief Technology Officer for the District of Columbia, has decided to switch the District's 38,000 employees from the installed Microsoft Office suite to the Web-based Google suite.

Last week, we covered how Zoho is defying conventional wisdom in the Web Office market. But is being unconventional all it takes for a bootstrapped start-up to take on both Microsoft and Google, in head to head evaluations by giant enterprises such as GE? Far from it. Whenever you see a surprising 'overnight sensation', you will usually find years of hard work and careful execution.

In Part 2 of this story, we reveal some of Zoho's cookbook.

We all love the David and Goliath story. What about David vs two Goliaths? That is the improbable story of Zoho, the Web Office startup competing head on with both Microsoft and Google. On top of that, Zoho is from India and who ever heard of a product company from India? Indeed Zoho has only 10 people in America, yet it is winning really big enterprise accounts in head to head evaluations with both Goliaths. What's more, they have not taken a dime of external money - having bootstrapped it from the start.

At Web 2.0 Expo in New York this week I met up with Raju Vegesna, one of Zoho's founders, to find out how they're succeeding despite the odds.

Today Google is launching a new product for the enterprise market, Google Video for business. It's a new application in the Google Apps office suite, enabling workers to upload and share videos inside their organizations. Videos can be shared on an individual, group or company-wide basis. Google sees it being used for such things as executive communications, product training, trip reports, "social videos" for the company intranet.

We think this has the potential to break open the Web Office market, because up till now nobody has done rich media for the enterprise as an easy to use browser-based package. Google Video for Business manages to do this, mostly because of YouTube's influence.

Today, Google's Gmail service experienced a system-wide outage that affected regular Gmail accounts as well as enterprise users. In the course of the afternoon, the service came back up for a little while, but as of now, there are still a lot of users who can't access their accounts (Update: looks like Gmail is now up and running again). Google is updating users through a forum on Google Groups. A lot of frustrated Gmail users used Twitter to voice their grievances, which, surprisingly, handled this sudden spike in traffic extremely well.

The calendar syncing and sharing company Calgoo has decided to release all its products for free. Until today, Calgoo made a free version of its software available and charged $30 a year for its more fully featured pro 'Connect' accounts. User who bought a license for the pro account before today will continue to receive free email support for the duration of their licence.

At its Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston today, Microsoft announced a roadmap and pricing for a number of online software packages for the enterprise and small business market. Microsoft Online Services is currently available in a limited beta and will come in two flavors: Business Productivity Online Standard Suite for $15 a seat, and a Deskless Worker Suite for $3 a seat.

Yesterday Google announced a new product aimed specifically at Google Apps' enterprise customers. The service, powered by Google acquisition Postini with technology from ScanSafe, is called Google Web Security for Enterprise and it offers real-time malware protection and URL filtering with policy enforcement and reporting. Essentially, it's a big Google firewall in the cloud.

Today's winning comment comes from our feature-by-feature comparison of Office Live Workspace and Google Docs. In the post Sarah Perez concluded that "Google Docs, although limited in its capabilities, offers real-time collaboration", while "Office Live Workspace [...] may not have the collaboration features of Google Docs, but the workspaces feature is unique." As usual when we compare Google with Microsoft office products, the discussion was feisty. Jrome's comment stood out though: he pointed to a compelling feature in Google Docs called GoogleLookUp. He explains below:

Today, Microsoft announced that the Office Live Workspace beta is publicly available for everyone to access. The site, a free web-based extension of Microsoft Office, lets you access your documents online and share your work with others. Some say that the service's launch is a direct response to Google's entry into the web office space with their Google Docs online service. If that's so, then the question now is: did Microsoft just trump Google Docs? Or does Google Docs still rule online office suites?