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Disclosure: I didn't get an early invitation, so this is not a first-hand review of Google Wave. But from what I know now, I don't want an invitation anymore. It looks like too much of a productivity suck. But I do use Google Spreadsheet all the time. It is the de facto real-time, online, distributed collaboration tool for serious GTD business. It is the best tool for an agile, networked business.

But it could be way, way better. Excel is still the best spreadsheet; it has just fallen behind on collaboration (and collaboration is a show-stopper). But Microsoft could catch up there, and a lot of really sharp startups are gunning for the same space.

Google has now integrated its translation technology into Google Docs, allowing users to convert their documents into any one of 42 languages with the click of a button. While the official Google blog highlighted a usage case of a child translating her drawing for her family, the enterprise blog post showcases a different usage case, one for enterprises that need to translate documents for the multilingual teams that operate in a global business landscape. There's just one problem with the tool: translations are pretty rough, and it's not suited to any application for which quality is critical. That makes it fine for casual use, but not for Google Apps enterprise and education customers.

Are you backing up your Google Docs? If not, it's better to be safe than sorry, especially when it comes to the cloud. For customers of the enterprise and education versions of the document software as a service, LTech's new tool lets administrators do comprehensive or selective backups.

There have been options before to backup your Docs, but LTech seems to be the first official enterprise partner of Google to offer such a software package. Currently there's a single user demo available for free, with an enterprise license for the domain version (of Apps).

After two years in the wild as a comprehensive suite, Google Apps has left beta. While having these hugely popular Web apps out of beta will undoubtedly have a positive effect on their use by consumers, it's the enterprise adoption that pushed Google to make the move.

For a long time now, the beta version of Apps has been far more stable than most software marked as such, though it's not been without hiccups. More importantly, seeing that beta label could still make big enterprise customers queasy, and if Google ever wanted to get serious about selling the Premier Edition, they needed to move Apps out of beta. That day has come.

We recently had the opportunity to test the new Microsoft Office plugin from OffiSync, which integrates Google Docs and Office. We can sum up our findings with one word: WOW. Although still in beta format, the plugin worked extremely well, providing that one missing aspect to the Microsoft Office software suite - an online component for storage, sharing, and collaboration.

Collaboration tools and online storage applications offer many possibilities: online collaborative editing, synchronizing across computers, sharing multiple files and discussion boards, and sharing windows and documents on the spot, to name a few. The following review of major products in this space will help you choose the right collaboration tools for your needs.

Google Docs just got an amazing new feature called insert drawing. With it you can now create and insert drawings directly into your Google documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The drawing creation tool is easy to use, and supports snapping to grid points and full free-form or constrained rotation and sizing of individual lines, shapes, or groups of composite items. The best part is that the entire insert drawing module is rendered in-browser.

Zoho just released version 2.0 of its Zoho Writer word processing application. While the company has added quite a few new and useful features in this release, the most obvious change is a new user interface which looks a lot like the 'Ribbon' in Microsoft Office. Thanks to this new user interface, the application now feels even more like a desktop application and has a far more professional and uncluttered look.

Google just released an updated version of its Google Docs spreadsheet product that finally allows you to edit your spreadsheets on a mobile phone. Now, if you have a G1, iPhone, iPod Touch, or Nokia S60 phone, you can not just browser through your spreadsheets, but actually edit them as well - though with some rather annoying limitations. Documents and presentations remain read-only for now.

Two former Microsoft employees, Shan Sinha, a former Microsoft SharePoint and SQL Server strategist, and Alex DeNeui, also a SQL strategist, are attempting to do what (so far) Microsoft has not: compete head-on with Google Docs by transforming Microsoft Office into online collaboration suite. To do so, they've launched a company called DocVerse, an early-stage startup that aims to simply document sharing and collaboration.