Google today took a step towards competing with Office and other production apps by enabling an offline version of Google Docs, its web-based work suite. The update uses Google's Gears platform to take most of the user's content offline. In addition to saving the workspace for use without an Internet connection, Docs also saves the customer's stored documents for editing later. Updates are re-synchronized with the server once the Internet connection comes back, Google says.

Docs works with any modern browser that supports Gears, but is currently limited to word documents and doesn't yet support presentations or spreadsheets. The feature also currently works just with the English version and should be available later for additional languages.