A Twitter post by Andrew Fogg, of The Royal Bank of Scotland and nascent Web 2.0 consultancy Kusiri, says Google is near to offering offline access for Gmail and Google Calendar. In the post, which, interestingly, has been scrubbed from his Twitter page, Fogg said he’s actually seen a demo and that enterprise users can expect it in six weeks.
Currently, Google Docs and Google Reader feature offline access via Gears, but users have been pestering Google to revamp the others members of its App suite to do the same. The problem with Calendar and Gmail is that they are collaborative applications used by multiple users and workgroups, which makes the logistics of synching up the data especially tricky.
With this in mind, the Google Operating System blog offered a glimpse into what the offline Google Calendar functionality may look like. From a screen image provided by users of Google Calendar who said a few months ago that “Google accidentally enabled the offline option in Google Calendar,” it looks like Google Calendar users can expect to get at least 3 months to play with offline. The mistakenly posted dialog box said: “To view and edit the next 3 months of your Google Calendar when you’re not connected to the Internet, click OK.”
Fogg also posted his insights into the Gmail synchronization problem, saying that Google Apps is set to support SyncML, the open information synching standard. That post disappeared too. And Google isn’t commenting beyond saying they are working to provide offline functionality for Google Apps.
