Worried about retraining staff moving from Microsoft Office to Google Apps? Canadian company Synergyse has come up with a clever approach to make the transition easier.

Claiming to be the only interactive training solution for Google Apps, the program uses audio and text captions to guide users through a task within Google Apps itself. Floating arrows appear in your inbox or the screen is greyed out with instructional text appearing in white overlaying the page.

A small audio player in the bottom left corner of the screen plays audio instructions in time with the animation. The lessons are generally around a minute long and are very specific, such as Compose an Email.

Synergyse was developed to help large companies facing difficulty with scaling their Google Apps training when moving from Microsoft technologies. “Organisations are wanting the collaboration of Google Apps but it’s really hard to train people on it,” said Varun Malhotra, Synergyse CEO.

“People who are switching to Google Apps need to know how to do things so they don’t lose productivity or gain efficiency,” Malhotra said.

The technical brains behind the design of Synergyse is an ex-Googler, Alex Kennberg. Kennberg built and launched products for Google including Gmail mobile and led the team that built the Google+ mobile interface.

The training company has been around for less than a year but has a customer list of 400 schools and enterprises, and has delivered over 100,000 lessons.