Google says the company will roll out offline functionality to its online office applications over the next few weeks.

Although both the new apps, Docs and Gears are still in beta versions, the move is directly aimed at Microsoft’s proprietary industry-standard Office suite.

Google also has plans to extend the offline access to it and to other hosted services in the Google Apps suite, of which Docs is part. Apps also includes Gmail, Calendar, Talk and others.

Google said users of its Google Docs word processing application can use Google Gears to save and then edit documents without being connected to the Internet.

Google Gears is an open-source project that any developer can use to build offline capability into web applications. It installs a database engine, based on SQLite, on the client system to locally cache the data. Google Gears-enabled pages use data from this local cache rather than from the online service. Using Google Gears, a web application may periodically synchronise the data in the local cache with the online service. If a network connection is not available, the synchronisation is deferred until a network connection is established.

For now, these offline capabilities will be limited to only word processing documents, though the company says it plans to add it to spreadsheets and presentations in the future.

And unlike the Office suite whose sales will bear the brunt of this release, Docs and Apps are free and will be available to anyone with a Google account. Docs is aimed primarily at consumers, while Google Apps, designed mainly for workplace use, has been adopted mostly by small organisations. However Google is expected to extend its reach into medium-size and large companies, and to that end has been boosting its security and administration features, particularly in its fee-based Premier version.

This move by Google is in line with what many IT analysts have been saying for the past few years – that software should be hosted by the vendor in order to reduce the customers’ cost and the complexity of installing and maintaining it.

And in a sign of things to come, Google isn’t the only provider of productivity and collaboration software to provide offline access for its applications. Other players in this market inlcude Zoho and Yahoo’s Zimbra who also have offline capabilities in their suites