Innovation is going to be the key weapon for success over the next five years, according to a recent survey of senior executives. The key to innovation is collaboration.  A report by The Future Foundation found employees who are given the opportunity to collaborate at work are more than twice as likely to have contributed new ideas to their company.

The personal productivity tools of the last twenty years - such as wordprocessors and spreadsheets – have changed the way individuals work. Google Apps for Business is changing the way teams work together.

With Apps, your whole team can work on the same document at once, whether they're sitting next to each other or half way around the world. You can see people type in real time and you can share a file with someone new in just two clicks. In comparison, it has been estimated that 66% of end users refuse to use Microsoft SharePoint for daily document exchange because they need to navigate through at least nine different windows to complete SharePoint tasks.

Google Apps offers further support for teams and projects through Google Sites, which allows you to quickly create intranets where you can securely share and manage all kinds of content, from documents to videos, with people inside and outside your organisation.

Gmail and Google Calendar also give you tools you won't find in traditional personal productivity suites like Microsoft Office - the product underpinning Office 365 - that help you work more effectively with colleagues. You can start an instant message conversation right from your inbox, quickly switch to a voice, video or group chat once you're chatting, or call someone's phone if they're not online - all from your browser, with no need to fire up separate applications.

In short, Google Apps doesn't just take traditional personal productivity software and make it available online, with collaboration retrofitted as an afterthought. They’ve been built from the ground up with collaboration in mind.

You can learn more about how Google Apps for Business supports collaboration in our recently launched white paper “5 Reasons to Choose Google Apps for Business over Office 365”.