First group gets access to online file storage and sharing space, but full public beta is weeks, possibly months, away…
“With Google Docs, Zoho, and others beating them to the punch, Microsoft’s Office Live Workspace, the company’s latest foray into the world of Web-based office productivity, is going live…”
Microsoft has begun a full roll out of the public beta of “Office Live Workspace,” its Web-based office productivity software, 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.
OLW, unveiled earlier this year, is a Web-based feature of Microsoft Office that allows for collaboration and sharing of documents. The technologies included in OLW have already been rolled into Microsoft’s Live@edu, a portal, communications, and collaboration suite for education.
The service, which lets users post Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, as well as PDF files to an online storage space, then share them with others, will be available to those who pre-registered in October, said Eric Gilmore, the senior product manager for Microsoft Office.
“At the start of the beta, we will have a private beta period,” Gilmore said. “We will somewhat restrict how many can come on in the next weeks and months until we open it for a public beta.” People who pre-registered will be admitted on a first-come, first-served basis, Gilmore said, so those who signed up immediately after the service’s Oct. 1 announcement will be among the first group given access.
Although Microsoft’s Web-based productivity applications have been challenged in recent months by Google, and despite the fact that some have said Microsoft’s online platform is sluggish in some instances, some Microsoft partners say that if not now, Microsoft Workspace Live will eventually become an important provider of software-as-a-service for small businesses.
“Based on feedback during initial testing and planning, we have received very positive feedback about Office Live Workspace,” said Kirk Gregersen, Office Director of Consumer and Small Business Product Management in an article posted on Microsoft’s site.
“The product team worked hard to give Office users what they have been asking us for. We did a ton of usability and early alpha testing, during which people gave us great feedback that we have been able to incorporate into the beta you will see now. We will continue to evolve the service over the coming months, drawing heavily from things we are hearing on the community forum and in our early adopter programs,” he added.
“Customers have asked for an easy way to save their documents from Office to the Web, so that they can get to their information or projects if they are away from their PC. People also get frustrated with the confusing free-for-all that can result when multiple versions of documents circulate in e-mail attachments that then have to be manually pulled together by the original author,” Gregersen said.
Unlike the efforts of rivals such as Google Inc. that are taking shots at Microsoft’s Office with online applications, Live Office Workspace is designed for storing and sharing documents, not creating them. The service links to the Windows versions of Office XP, 2003 and 2007 via Save As commands in its applications — a download add-in is necessary to enable the feature — and users can designate workspaces as private or shared. A limited set of collaboration tools, including one that lets multiple users add comments to documents stored online, will also be included.
Microsoft has, however, signed up several universities and colleges to an early adopter program, including the University of Illinois, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Washington. Gilmore said that interest from schools exceeded Microsoft’s expectations and that the company filled the available slots quickly.
“The service also responds to some of the top requests that we have gotten from Office customers, which require a combination of the Web and great integration with Office on the desktop to really solve,” Gregersen said. “The way that Office Live Workspace extends Office on the desktop is a good example of what Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie refer to as our ‘software plus services’ approach.”
“Many students and faculty members use Office on the desktop every day, so people have been particularly excited about how Office and Office Live Workspace work together with features like the one-click save to their workspace, the Office Live Workspace add-in for Office, the high fidelity viewing experience, and the Outlook and Excel synching capabilities.”
Other universities participating in the Office Live Workspace University Early Adopter Program have included Ball State University, DeVry University, Florida Community College at Jacksonville, Indiana University, Kentucky Community and Technical College System, Michigan State University, University of Illinois, and Rio Salado College of the Maricopa Community Colleges.
Despite any drawbacks currently, Office Live Workspace will capture small business customers’ attention, said Neil Pearlstein, president of PC Professional, a Microsoft Gold Partner.
“Software-as-a-service in general, and what Microsoft is calling software-plus-services, is going to have a place in the IT world, not only in universities and government,” Pearlstein said. “It will be utilized by small businesses and by any business that will have a good, solid reason to lease software licensing. I think Microsoft will have something done by 2009 at the latest. Its impact on IT will be positive, and the channel will be an important player in bringing it forward.”
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 does not 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, besides giving them the ability to preview the document online.
“Pearlstein said he expects Microsoft to overcome criticisms of sluggishness in some of the applications and ultimately best Google.”
“Google is a player in this industry, but Microsoft does the research and development to usually beat the competition in the long run,” Pearlstein said. “Anything that is Web-based is going to be clunkier than a client-based product. But if you looked at Web-based applications from three years ago, there is no comparison with the today.”
While Microsoft is perceived as a late starter in the world of Web-based collaborative productivity, it still dominates the office productivity market and online competitors like Google have yet to make any real inroads with the general public.
However, Office Live Workspace is still a humble beginning for the online functionality that will likely find itself imbedded into the fabric of Office itself in the future. It is not a full, online suite of Office applications, but rather a set of collaborative tools meant to work with the Office client apps.
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 e-mails. Collaborators can be designated as either Editors or Viewers.
File locking works the same way it does in multi-user 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—courtesy of the service’s being built on top of SharePoint.
Live@edu was also upgraded to provide 5 GB of e-mail storage space (up from 2 GB) and 1 GB of general storage space (password-protected). It has also added enhancements to e-mail, including white-listing (which prevents specified e-mail addresses from being caught by the spam filter) and automatic e-mail reply.
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.
A final release date for Office Live Workspace is “to be determined,” Gilmore said, as are details of its pricing structure. The beta, however, is available free of charge, though only to U.S. residents. The service will open to international users early in 2008, and support for languages others than English will be added later next year.
More information about the service and a sign-up form for admission to the beta test pool can be found at: http://workspace.officelive.com/.