"It's a crowded market, but that's a testament to the fact that there's value in a business situation to be able to bring people together with audio and video and be able to look at content and make changes in real time," Forrester's McLeish said. "It's one piece of the collaboration puzzle, and it certainly appears that Google is looking to take a very holistic approach."

"If Web conferencing was there, we'd definitely use it," said Darryl Shippy, IT director at Truck Movers in Kansas City, Missouri, where about 45 employees use the free Apps Standard edition.

Google could also improve the features in Docs, particularly the formatting capabilities, which still lag significantly behind Microsoft Office, and a central repository for managing Apps files would also be helpful, Shippy said in a phone interview.

Google is also long-rumored to be building a hosted storage service dubbed Gdrive that could be useful as a single repository for Apps, not only for documents but for other types of content, such as multimedia.

Last but not least, Google recently announced a new collaboration and communication tool called Wave that consolidates features from e-mail, instant messaging, blogging, wikis, multimedia management and document sharing. Although Wave is now only available in early release to developers, the product could eventually find its way to Apps.