Office Live Workspace

Hoover, Nicholas J. "Microsoft Joins Online Productivity Game With Office Live Workspaces." InformationWeek. 1 October 2007.

On Monday (10/1) Microsoft is expected to announce a free product called Office Live Workspace which will enable users to access and share documents online. The software will enter testing later this year. Microsoft has been falling behind in the software-plus-services category. Google offers online Docs & Spreadsheets, and Zoho offers an online productivity suite. Monday, Adobe announced it was buying Buzzword, which makes a Flash-based word processor that has a more familiar look and feel than other online productivity suites.

Office Live Workspace:

• allows people to store, share, and collaborate on Word, PowerPoint, and Excel docs online
• allows people to share their desktop with one another
• allows users to save a doc to the Workspace website by clicking a toolbar button in their Office application itself
• enables authors to store, share, or allow others to comment on and/or edit the docs
• gives authors granular control over who they allow to view their docs
• enables both non-Office users and Office users to view and comment on docs
• is free and accessible from anywhere
• could be a good way for companies to collaborate with customers who cannot access applications inside the corporte firewall
• could allow employees to collaborate from home in the evening

A desktop-based feature of Workspace, called SharedView, is expected to be available Monday as a beta. With SharedView:

• users can see and make changes to docs in real-time
• users can share open applications
• users can see who made each change to the doc
• the person who initiates SharedView session controls who gets to edit at any one time

SharedView could remain as a standalone product. SharedView serves ads to those who aren't leading the session, which suggests that Office Live Workspace could be ad-supported.

Problems with Office Live Workspace would need to be fixed before it gets released:

• in SharedView, a session leader who has given up control of an application gets control back by clicking the mouse, so this means the session leader cannot use the mouse and switch between apps while someone else is editing the document
• in the beta version of SharedView, there is no way to chat. The final version will give the ability to "send notes" back and forth, but there will not be instant messaging
• the parts of Workspace that require a download will not work with a Mac or Linux
• Workspace requires Internet Explorer or Firefox to run