Picasa will show you EXIF metadata, and will sort images based on the date field in the EXIF header, but it doesn't appear to have any way of editing EXIF. Instead, as far as I can tell, everything just goes into its own database.

To me, Picasa is a handy tool for glancing at a large volume of pictures, just another tool in the toolbox. I certainly wouldn't use it if I was a newspaper trying to track the output of a staff of photographers...