When I first saw this yesterday I thought it might be an early April Fools Day joke, but it turns out it is the real deal. Rafe Needleman on WebWare broke the news that we all knew was coming some day. Google is preparing to roll out offline access to their cloud app, Google Docs. Using Google Gears, users will start seeing this soon (it is a phased roll out) and it will at first only work with the word processor, with the spreadsheet and presentation apps to follow.

A couple of caveats. You won’t be able to create documents off line in the first roll out and of course collaboration can’t occur when you are offline. That should make things interesting if two parties are working offline on the same doc and eventually try to sync up the changes.

Like I said, we’ve all known this was coming. Now we’ll see how this begins to work.