Google will add a presentation application to its Google Apps lineup by year-end, and possibly could add other applications to that suite.

These include video, note-taking, blogging and group-discussion applications. Google also is aiming to establish parity between the offline and online capabilities of its productivity suite, says Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management in Google's enterprise division.

Google last week introduced a set of APIs as part of a browser extension called Google Gears that will let Web-based applications work in disconnected mode.

“Presentation is a feature of Google Documents, it’s not as much building a separate presentation application,” Glotzbach says. “We are building this ability to present from a document.”

Currently, the most popular presentation application among corporate users is Microsoft PowerPoint.

Google announced in April it was working on a presentation component for its Google Apps suite of Office-like applications that include e-mail, a document editor, spreadsheet and other collaboration tools. A premier edition targets corporate users and is viewed as an alternative to Microsoft Office, even though the Google package offers nowhere near the feature set of Office.

“Does [presentation] round out our suite? I think it is a great component to add in, and I think there are probably others,” Glotzbach says. “Every day we get asked about the other Google properties. What about YouTube? What about Google Notebook? What about Blogger? What about Google Groups? From my view, those are all candidate applications that probably would have a strong following if they were part of the Google Apps offering. When we get to those, and if we get to those, remains to be seen.”

Google Apps Premier Edition includes Gmail with 10GB of storage, Goggle Docs & Spreadsheets, integrated instant messaging and search tools, Google Talk for IM and VoIP services, support for Gmail on BlackBerry mobile devices, Google Calendar, a set of APIs and partner technologies to integrate with existing enterprise applications, and 24/7 phone support. The suite is priced at $50 per user.

Google also includes security options via partner Sxip that let companies tie it into their existing corporate directories and extend single sign-on to Google’s hosted application services.