It was only going to be a matter of time before Microsoft took a step towards bringing their Office Suite online, and yesterday they made that first step by announcing Microsoft Office Live Workspace. It’s described as the online companion to Microsoft Office and for now, only pre-registration is available. They have yet to release it into beta, but once it is, only a limited number of people who have pre-registered will get the chance to try it.
Unlike web-based office suites that allow you to author documents from your web browser (like Zoho or Google Docs), the Office Live Workspace is really only going to be used for online storage for documents and collaboration. While a user will be able to control who can view, comment, or edit documents, they can’t author any documents inside the browser. If you want to author or edit documents, it must be done on the desktop version of Office. This factor alone is probably the biggest disappointment and limitation of Office Live Workspace.
So how would this service be useful? Well, it eliminates the need for emailing yourself documents or carrying around a flash drive wherever you go. As long as you have an Internet connection and a web browser, you’ll be able to access the documents that you have saved to your workspace. This workspace will open and save files right from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but you can also save images and PDF’s as well.
The fact that users can’t author documents inside a web browser means that this is by no means a free alternative to Microsoft Office. You’ll need to pay the price for the Office Suite software if you want the Office Live Workspace to be of any use to you. While they currently don’t plan to let users author documents from the browser, that doesn’t mean that it won’t happen in the future. According to Todd Bishop over at SeattlePI, the senior product manager for Microsoft Office, Eric Gilmore says that Microsoft hasn’t ruled out the possibility that users would be able to author documents online – but it would require that they integrate ads to make revenue off of it.
While this sounds like it could certainly come in handy at work, school, or even home, there’s no word on when Microsoft intends to release Microsoft Office Live Workspace into beta. Todd Bishop points out that the media wasn’t given the opportunity to try a working-version of the service, so for all we know, this could end up on the Vaporware list – or the list of a highly anticipated technology products or services that are promised, but never delivered.
I was expecting a competitor to Google, Zoho… docs w/ potentially the ribbon. This a great dissapointment. I have unlimited storage on my Y!Mail for data.
I was a little disappointed as well, but in a way they are pretty smart. Businesses that I’ve talked to have a hard time relying on what the online services offer, and are afraid of inaccessibility, dataloss, or lack of features. When people think of inaccessibility they typically think of sites having downtime, but that’s normally not a problem. The real problem comes about when businesses may lose their Internet connection. If they can’t access their online documents then how are they supposed to get any work done.
So I would say Microsoft is actually smart the way they did it. There’s little doubt that businesses are the bulk of Office purchases, and by offering online storage for documents they are just breaking down the barrier of email documents from one person to another, or even to yourself. So while I would like to sit here and say Microsoft went about this the wrong way I actually think they did what was right. Although my opinion may change in a year or two as the web continues to evolve.
I guess this is good for buissinesses. I was thinking more of a service beneficial to individuals. For them editing isn’t really a big thing, but having a nice site to replace Office for free sounds good.
You’re the first person I’ve seen that has covered this from the right angle… everybody else just complains that it’s not the same as Google Docs. Which really isn’t what they are trying to do anyway… MS wouldn’t make something that competes with their cash cow.
Good job, as usual.
Is this not unfair trade practices?? why the hell I should have IE for using Microsoft office live?
In order to use Microsoft Office Live, you will need to have Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or later running on Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Microsoft Windows Server 2003. You can download the latest version of Internet Explorer from the Internet Explorer downloads page.
Thanks, we always try to look at things from multiple perspectives. The way Microsoft did this will give this service a strong value for their software. I could see this becoming more popular than Google Docs or other alternatives because users would be able to use something that they’re familiar with and not have to spend time learning something new.
hey this idea strikes and i think with this idea of online storage of all kinds of files the idea of more files with the new facility for online storage is possible with microsoft office online feature.
you write more documents in microsoft word and make more such spreadsheets in microsoft Excel and try and make more space on the web for the storage for the same.
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