Okay, so Google Apps– aka Google Premiere Edition — is now on the radar screen. Big announcement, lots of PR, some interesting commentaries from traditional sources like Infoworld (see their article, “Google Apps aims beyond Microsoft Office,” by Ephraim Schwartz, published February 23rd).

We’ve all seen G-mail, and most of us have played around with Google Docs and Google Spreadsheet (or whatever it’s called). We can debate whether these tools provide enough features to attract enough market share for Microsoft to wake up and notice; and we can debate how important it is that Google’s products are the quintessence of Web 2.0 — i.e., web-based rather than products. I think it’s far more important that Google is offering, as Mr. Schwartz points out in his article, “the kind of support corporate IT would expect: IT management tools, technical support, and service level agreements for uptime.” How good a job they do in these areas remains to be seen.

But what’s far more important is Schwartz’s comment that “Google made it clear that it will offer APIs for business integration, thus creating a business platform not unlike what Salesforce.com offers with AppExchange.” Apparently, Avaya and Postini (who? no, I’ve never heard of them either) both participated in the Google Docs product announcement, “saying they would develop a ‘variety of solutions’ based on Google’s APIs. Included among those third-party applications will be e-mail gateways, enhanced security, calendar synchronization, and VoIP integration between Avaya and Google Talk.”

Well, who knows what that means … and who knows whether any of us will really want to have some kind of integration between VoIP (I don’t even use Skype at the moment!) and Google Docs? But if these two vendors start the ball rolling, then we may find dozens, if not hundreds, of other little startup companies in SIlicon Valley finding cool things they can do when interfacing their products with Google Docs.

Interestingly, a colleague of mine sent me an email suggesting that he and I, along several others who often collaborate about technology trends, might consider using Google Docs to create some of our documents and technical reports. Yeah, maybe so: but it’s interesting that I did not have the reaction of, “Omygod! Yes!! This has never been possible before!” Instead, I found myself wondering, “Well, why not just use a wiki? And what’s wrong with Microsoft Word’s ‘Track Changes’ mechanism, since we’re not really collaborating in real time?” It’s quite possible, of course, that a college professor might have an entirely different opinion about the virtues of Google Apps as a means of collaborating with his or her class of students.

I also considered the possibility of using Google Docs as a more convenient way of sharing documents with another colleague on a couple of consulting projects we’re working on. At the moment, we use Microsoft Word, but there are times when we both want to edit and revise different parts of the same document at the same time; maybe it would be easier with Google Docs. But I only managed to think about this for a second or two before a practical concern raised its ugly head: what about security? Two of the projects we’re working on have a price-tag, from the clients’ perspective, of tens of millions of dollars; and one of them has a price-tag of a couple billion dollars. Do I really want to trust Google’s assurances that its servers are secure, and that hackers won’t be able to see what we’re working on? I don’t want to be the guineau pig on that one, and I suspect that a lot of Fortune 500 IT professionals feel the same way. On the other hand, the proverbial college professor, and his class full of feisty students, probably don’t have the same perspective.

So I’ll keep watching the evolution of Google Docs, and I’m sure I’ll eventually find an opportunity to use it, where it will be far superior to the old, tried-and-true approach of using Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.

Meanwhile, I can only hope that Google doesn’t decide to implement its own version of PowerPoint. One such product is more than enough for the human race…