MS Office Live Workspace Beta

MS Office users can now be more productive by viewing, sharing, and editing their Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents over the Internet using a web browser

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

A workspace that can be shared with others and is accessible from anywhere is fast becoming a necessity for individuals that are always on the move. Office Live Workspace is an online space provided by Microsoft for saving, accessing, and sharing documents and files. Using it one can access his/her documents from anywhere over an Internet connection via Web browser. This tool can be used for grouping information for work, school, and personal projects. Consider an example where a team is working on different modules of the same project and all are on the move. Now to update each other about the status and to actually show the amount of work done this workspace can be of great help. To use this workspace there is no download required. One just needs to sign up and and get a Windows live ID to start using it. The web interface of Live Workspace is very well designed, making it very easy to use. One can create office documents on their machines and directly save them in the provided Web space (using .NET passport).

Another great feature of this workspace is proper management of different versions of the same document. This helps in better understanding of content and even enables one to rollback to a previous version if required. You can also add comments to the documents for better communication. Sharing documents with other users for viewing or editing is another useful feature of this Workspace. Other users will also need to have MS Office installed on their machines if they want to edit the documents. Viewing documents however, doesn't require this. People with MS Office installed will also need to install a Live update on their systems. This is pretty easy to do and takes just a few minutes. Once done, you can start sharing and working on Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents.

After sign-in, all documents that you upload to Office Live are listed in the middle. The interface is quite simple and easy to use. You can easily add/remove/share documents	You can also create a new workspace, or choose from existing ones. The pre-built ones contain document templates for you to quickly get started

We created a Word document for our workspace, which can be saved directly to Office Live Workspace, as shown in the figure	After creating the document, different versions of same doc can be saved. To achieve it click on 'version' and select 'Save to version history'

You can also add comments to this shared doc, which aides in communication amongst people sharing the same document	To share the documents you just need to type in the e-mail address of the individual you want to share the information with

To edit the documents, click on edit button which will open documents to be edited in corresponding office programs (Word in our case) after authentication	Different versions of same document and added comments are displayed on right-hand side of Window with read-only view in the middle

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