Because Kerika uses a storage server that kicks in automatically when it detects that your team mates are offline, you don’t have to worry about being online at the same time as them. And if you yourself are offline, Kerika simply buffers up the updates you made locally until you get a chance to go online again.

More importantly, you can communicate your ideas in a visual form, by literally sketching out your project, process or strategy and then adding your content to these digital pages. This is particularly important when you need to make sure everyone is always “on the same page” with respect to strategy and process, and this is something that is really hard to do well with email, whether you are talking about traditional email clients like Outlook or Web 2.0 ones like Gmail.

Two other points I would make:

– When people are frequently offline, you need a distributed document management system, not a centralized checkout/checkin system like you get with hosted services. Kerika provides that in a seamless way.

– A system like Kerika gives you far greater privacy than you can ever hope to get from any hosted provider, Google or anyone else. You can set up your private network, at no extra cost and in just a couple of minutes, so that your project materials stay within a ring of trust consisting of your computer, your team mates’ computers, and your private server.

Take a look at this demo: http://www.kerika.com/demo_intro.html. It’s just a couple of minutes long, but I think you will be amazed by what’s possible!

We are offering Kerika free to the academic community, and I would be open to offering it free to selected non-profits like ours. (It is easy for us to offer it free to everyone in the academic community by just looking for a “.edu” email address, but since anyone can get a “.org” email address we want to deal with that on a case-by-case basis.)