First Impressions of Office Live Workspace
I have just signed up for Office Live Workspace, although it is only available for U.S only. My live id is configured for U.S. and so is my browser.
What do you get for signing up?
Anywhere Access
- Save 1000+ Microsoft Office documents in one place
- Access them from almost any computer with a Web browser
- No more flash drives or sending yourself documents via e-mail
Share with Others
- Invite people to your workspace
- You control who can view, comment, and edit your documents
- Stop manually merging versions from multiple people
Extend the Microsoft Office Experience
- Open and save files directly from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
- Synchronize contact, task, and event lists with Outlook
- No need to learn a new program
My Impression of Office Live Workspace
I can say this is a skinned version of SharePoint. If it is not built on actual MOSS 2007, atleast the framework has been.
If you have used SharePoint, then you will see what I mean. If you haven’t used SharePoint (as an end user), now you are! All in all a good start.
My initial impression – this is built on SharePoint! This was confirmed when I was able to synchronise my workspace contact list with my Outlook.
This is a two way sync with Outlook 2007. In addition to contact list, I am able to synchormise my task list and calendar. All this we wanted with Google Apps and we had to rely on 3rd party providers. It is all built in here if you have Office 2007.
What you have got here is a document management system with limitations in terms of space, but you still have basic functionality of being able to check-in, check-out, document version history, comments.
You can create different workspaces – trip workspace, class workspace, etc.
Only thing missing is the Picture Library at this stage.
If you have Outlook 2007, then you are in for a treat with these lists. To edit other types like, Word, Excel, PowerPoint you would need to have Office 2007 suite. At this stage I cannot confirm how much you can make use of Office 2003 with Office Live Workspace, since I don’t have Office 2003 installed.
Download Office Live Workspace Update for Windows Vista | Sign up now
Examples of how you can use Microsoft Office Live Workspace
Looks promising for now
Yes Vagner, it is very interesting and I have found something more interesting, which I hope to blog soon.
Hi Alpesh, I have also reviewed this on my blog. To clarify a few points you make (good overview by the way):
- you can use 2003 instead of 2007, you just need the compatibility pack which comes as part of OLW
- although there isn’t a picture library on office live workspaces, this capability is offered on the sister offering skydrive.live.com
- also you get full versioning on documents and history of updates which i think is very cool
Hope this helps,
Darren
btw does the internet speed matter while opening the document??is it like live documents from microsoft??
Yes internet speed does matter. This is live documents from Microsoft and is different then what you are referring to as what Sabeer Bhatia has released.
Thanks Darren. I was away on holidays when I saw your comment. Yes that’s what skydrive is for!
Agreed this sharepoint lite version is cool. Thanks for dropping by.
I signed up for the live workspace beta and have been toying with the desktop sharing tool which is a mini live meeting. Initial impressions are pretty good but it is still a little buggy. Document features are similar to office live and it will be interesting to see how they integrate or differentiate the two platforms. One thing I noticed about office live is that it is essentially hotmail on the backend and you cannot sync your calendar as you might expect but I have not tested this with live workspaces. The lack of calendar sync for office live, even in the premium edition, is a bummer. I hope they merge the two platforms to eliminate this issue.
I am using zigime workspace and its quite good. Its quite different from Google Docs and office live though, but useful. I think it will take some time to become popular, especially among Groups but nowadays people are enjoying to do work in zigime workspace