Blogoscoped's Philipp Lenssen published an interesting post today with slides of some collaboration tools Google uses in-house to help its knowledge workers and programmers work more efficiently.

The tools -- Projects, the Google intranet MOMA, Google Ideas and Google Caribou Alpha (likely Gmail), Google Experts Search, Googler Search -- were featured in slides during a Web seminar hosted by Google and KMWorld Magazine.

What struck me is that some of these tools perform the functions that analysts and Google customers have been saying should show up in Google Apps in 2008. Take for instance Projects, which is a dashboard for organizing tasks.

Analysts and customers alike told me they expected Google to create some sort of task or even project management capabilities to offer in Apps. The recent launch of Google Sites was a step in the right direction, but Projects looks like it would nicely round out the way customers map out their workflows.

Of course, if Google takes Projects and productizes it in Apps, we can forget about my theory that Google might buy a project management specialist like LiquidPlanner, but as long as Google fills the void, who cares? It can spend what it saved on LiquidPlanner on buying some big company to answer Microhoo ... like Adobe or Apple. Whew. Somebody stop me!

Looking at other internal apps, Google Ideas in slides from 2006 looks like a forum for peddling product ideas, complete with social tools such as ratings, discussion forums and buzz scores.

The product notepad is so-so, but the social tools indicate that Google was pretty prescient two years ago; now several vendors, including Yahoo and StumbleUpon, offer the same tools in the market.

MOMA, meanwhile, is an intranet. I've used two intranets in my professional career so maybe I'm no expert who can say whether or not it's possible for intranets to be fun, but MOMA with all of its customizable bells and whistles is no doubt way cooler than a lot of the ad-hoc intranets that we're likely to see.

Google's internal collaboration apps also include the search tools Google Experts Search and Googler Search. These tools help Google employees find coworkers with special expertise.

Ironically, IBM does this with Lotus Connections, which it just integrated into its Sametime Advanced unified communications and collaboration application.

Google is also testing Knol as an external expert search practice the company will eventually monetize with ads, so maybe taking the tool from its intranet is not in the cards.

Of course, Google could just keep all of these internal tools to itself and build out fresh approaches for the market, but it's interesting to see pics of the things that keep Google employees working like well-oiled machines.