Comment by InformalRelief

It is certainly not only for academic papers. See [this thread](http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/40720/latex-in-indust...) for example. But it may not be suitable in the environment you describe, the learning curve could be too steep for "business users [...] familiar with word". It could work however if they only need to edit something you built and are at least capable of editing html.