Free online office productivity suites would seem to be perfect for small businesses. Why do so few of them even know they exist? 

A new survey (PDF) from AMI-Partners found that 38% of small businesses (companies with one to 99 employees) don’t know that free online alternatives to Microsoft Office exist. 

Small businesses outside theUnited States were even more unaware. In the U.K., 50% of small businesses were unaware, and in India 53 percent of businesses weren’t clued in. 

AMI said that vendors need to boost awareness of their Office alternatives and demonstrate the value of these tools for collaboration. 

Of course, one of the most famous companies in the world offers a fairly robust suite of office productivity tools: Google Apps. Have hundreds of thousands of small businesses truly not heard of Gmail, which is an integral part of Google Apps? I suppose it’s possible.  

There are some other online productivity applications out there that are fairly less well known. Their user communities are smaller but very devoted to the technology. There is ThinkFree, which I wrote about earlier this year, and Zoho. 

All of these services offer free versions of their technology and some interoperability with Microsoft Office. The companies I’ve talked to like the collaborative nature of online office productivity technology, but they aren’t read to rip and replace their installed Microsoft Office just yet. Still, small businesses could benefit from these technologies, especially since they’re free.