Zimbra, one of the Web Office vendors we've been tracking for a while, will later today announce the launch of Zimbra Desktop - which enables offline access to Zimbra's Ajax-powered collaboration suite. Zimbra will unveil Zimbra Desktop on stage today (Monday PT) at the ETech Conference in San Diego.

A few years ago, many optimistic people predicted the demise of desktop apps due to the coming 'always on' broadband era (I think I may've been one of them!). But as we know, the reality today is that broadband access is problematic in some parts of the world - so offline access has turned out to be key in the web 2.0 world. I suppose one day we will finally reach the 'always on' nirvana, but for now it's a good thing we have Zimbra, Morfik, Mozilla, Google and other companies producing offline desktop access to web apps.