With Google Docs, Zoho, and others beating them to the punch, Microsoft has finally made online office document-sharing available to all. Office Live Workspace was released today as public open beta available to anyone with a Windows Live ID. As part of what Bill Gates calls the company's "software plus services" approach, Live Workspace is less about editing online than about sharing and saving documents to the web.
Microsoft approaches the document collaboration project from the opposite side of Zoho and Google, adding choices in installed office applications for saving documents to the web, rather than starting on the web and letting you move the document to a local hard drive. Though it doesn't let you edit documents from a web-based interface, as the Google and Zoho alternatives do, Live Workspace lets users save Office documents directly to the web from the installed Microsoft Office apps—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. It also gives them the ability to preview the document online.
Microsoft approaches the document collaboration project from the opposite side of Zoho and Google, adding choices in installed office applications for saving documents to the web, rather than starting on the web and letting you move the document to a local hard drive. Though it doesn't let you edit documents from a web-based interface, as the Google and Zoho alternatives do, Live Workspace lets users save Office documents directly to the web from the installed Microsoft Office apps—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. It also gives them the ability to preview the document online.
You start by setting up an account using a Windows Live ID, and can then create multiple Workspaces for any groups you want to collaborate with. After that, sharing documents with members is just a matter of sending invitation emails. Collaborators can be designated as either Editors or Viewers. File locking works the same way it does in multiuser Office situations, with the usual choices of "Open as read only," notify when the file is available, and save as another filename. An Office Live toolbar installed in Office applications gives participants the choice to save documents to or open them from any shared Workspace.
Microsoft says users will be able to store a thousand or more documents online (the available space limit is 500MB), based on average file sizes. Security stems from the Windows Live ID requirement for all collaborators, and you get the same virus protection afforded by Microsoft Forefront Security for SharePoint&8212;courtesy of the service's being built on top of SharePoint. The service works in Internet Explorer 6.0 or later on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista; Firefox 2.0 on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista; or Firefox 2.0 on Mac OS X 10.2.x and later.
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