With Google’s announcement extending its free Education Version of Google Apps to nonprofits, charitable organizations are situated better than ever to leverage On-Demand Productivity Tools (a.k.a. SaaS: Software as a Service). By no means is Google the only on-demand office productivity player: Zoho, ThinkFree, and Goowy are also viable contenders. Google, however, is making its services extremely attractive and accessible to nonprofits, not only through their donation of Google Apps to nonprofits a la the Salesforce.com model—underwriting the donation via a sustainable for-profit revenue stream—but by providing tight integration between their products and desktop/offline apps.

The biggest challenge for Google Apps and other on-demand productivity suites is making the case to nonprofits: What is the value proposition making the transition from their current systems and processes a worthwhile investment? Of course there are the cost saving incentives, both in terms of infrastructure and management. There are no doubt both advantages and liabilities over traditional desktop applications, but the beauty of web apps is that they augment rather than replace systems. To that end, let’s take a look at how an organization might use a suite of on-demand productivity tools, in this case, Google Apps, as part of their system.

Email
Most of us live in our email: it is the nexus of our daily work. More often than not, we use a desktop client like Outlook or Mail to manage our email. Fortunately, Gmail doesn’t preclude you from using use your favorite email client, but only adds value to both the individual and the organization. Gmail can be set up as a POP server to download email via a desktop client, while still providing secure and synchronized remote access to a staff person’s email via the Gmail web interface. Using Gmail in this way creates a local copy as well as an online archive of email, mitigating the potential of loosing critical information and institutional memory. And because it’s Google, the search features within the Gmail interface make it virtually impossible to misplace anything—unless you delete it.

In addition to search, Gmail has a slough of features that make it exemplary: Email migration from other applications, the best spam filters bar none, grouped conversations, great Firefox add-ons (check-out Better Gmail), really good mobile access, and, of course, great integration with their other applications, like Google Desktop, iGoogle, Google Calendar, Google Docs and hopefully sometime soon, Google Gears. You can see a full list of features here.

One controversial, if not killer, feature of Gmail is Gtalk: Google IM. What makes Gtalk controversial is that it records IM conversations in Gmail. I personally love this feature: so much information is exchanged via IM conversations and Gmail allows me to search IMs at the same time I search emails. For some, IM conversations are far too personal and/or private to be tracked. Fortunately, it is possible to use the Gtalk Client (for PCs only) to go off the record, so the conversation does not get recorded.

Advantages: Backup/Archive, POP access, rich Gmail features, integration with other Google Apps.
Liabilities: Like any ISP, uncertain security of highly sensitive information, particularly for political groups. Gmail API is not firm, difficult to build plug-ins off of it.

Calendar
The other primary component of our on-demand productivity tools is the calendar. For anyone who has tried to share and synchronize calendars either internally (Outlook without Exchange) or externally (through a third party service for iCal) knows the greatest feature of GCal is its bomb-proof sharing features. Organizations can create calendars for each facet of their organization (program, fundraising, communication, administration, events, etc.), and give the appropriate staff people access. Staff members can also manage their own personal calendars and grant access to others as needed.

The last organization I worked for migrated seamlessly from Outlook to Gcal. It was a simple migration and staff fell in love with its sharing and user interface immediately. GCal also made scheduling meetings much easier, as you can invite people directly out of your Gmail Contacts and allow invitees to RSVP right from the email invite.

GCal has tight integration with Gmail—any dates in an email can be automatically added to Gcal—as well as other applications like Remember the Milk and Toodledo. Additionally, Gcal can be re-purposed and published in different formats, like iCal, XML, HTML and iFrames; if your organization manages an event calendar in Gcal, it can easily publish it to the web through an iFrame.

Advantages: Multiple Calendars with different sharing privileges, multiple output formats, intuitive interface, integration with Gmail.
Liabilities: Unless you use an iCal capable desktop calendar like Mozilla, there is not offline access. With my Blackberry, the UI is dreadful.

Word Processing and Spreadsheets
Google Docs combines word processing and spreadsheets in one application. GDocs doesn’t replace desktop apps so much as provides amazing collaborative writing and editing possibilities. So often when documents are written within an organization, there are multiple versions with edits that need to be collated. Gdocs allow a team of writers and editors to work on a single document in real time (or rather, with a 5 sec delay) without having to struggle with the editorial process. Gdocs creates a revision history, so you’ll know who made what changes and when; documents can easily be reverted back, if necessary. Once a document is complete, it can be exported into virtually any format you might want: Word, PDF, HTML, even Open Office. Plus, there is full email integration so documents can be emailed directly to someone or opened within Gmail. Very cool.

To me, GDocs was the weakest link in the Google Apps Suite until a couple weeks ago. It felt like a cobbled together application of Writely and a sub par spreadsheet app, difficult to manage and organize and sporting a lackluster UI to boot. While not yet fully baked, Google did release a redesigned Docs Home UI a couple weeks ago, creating a folder system that now makes GDocs a viable centralized document management system. I use GDocs with several of my clients to create and manage documentation of their systems. For example, for my database clients, I embed a unique GDoc URL directly into the database UI, so users can access it without having to dig for it.

Advantages: Collaborative writing and editing, Gmail integration, clean output to multiple formats, centralized/remote/backup document management system.
Liabilities: Does not replace desktop applications, UI is still a work in progress.

What’s missing
The Google Apps suite also comes with a Start Page (iGoogle) and Webpages. What’s really missing for me is integration with Google Groups—so that organizations can manage listservs in one place—and some sort of project management component. Supposedly, PM is coming once JotSpot is incorporated into the Google framework. I believe project and task management will be a huge selling point for most organizations, really bringing the different Google Apps together.

Bringing it all together

For users
Through the Gmail interface, productivity and intra-app-operability are dreamy in Google Apps. Adding meetings to GCal and opening documents in GDocs directly from Gmail makes for a very fluid personal workflow. By far, the biggest value proposition for organizations is the effective and low-cost collaboration tools Google Apps provides, both for internal staff and external stakeholders (consultants, board members, etc).

For Admins
Google Apps provides a very simple administrative interface to add and manage users, create email lists and manage features. It’s no Exchange Server, but for most small organizations, it’s just right. With no costly server upkeep or annual maintenance fees and better than average customer support, Google Apps for nonprofits looks pretty enticing on the admin side.

So why wait? Because it’s free, nonprofits can evaluate the usefulness of Google Apps themselves at no risk, and potentially, great benefit.