Microsoft Office Live Workspace is one of the more interesting ways to store documents online and share them easily. Access is obtained through your Windows Live ID, the password that is becoming increasingly important as Microsoft pulls the various Windows Live services together. Here’s some background on Office Live Workspace.
An update was released this week:
“The Office Live Update 1.2 installs (1) performance updates to make using Office Live Workspace with Microsoft Office programs faster, (2) the latest Office Live Add-in for Microsoft Office that enables you to access your workspaces directly from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and (3) the Multiple Document Upload Tool and (4) the Firefox add-in to allow users of the Firefox browser to use Office Live Workspace with Microsoft Office.”
Once the OLW software is installed, the files stored online can be opened from a web browser, or directly from Office programs – OLW is added to the menu in Office 2007, or on a new toolbar in Office 2003/XP.
Although I’d encourage you to try the service if you’re interested, I’ve found there are still a couple of things missing. One is a little thing – the file list does not remain sorted the way I left it. If I sort the files alphabetically, I want it sorted alphabetically when I return. (For some reason, the file sorting cannot be changed from its random order when I open the list from inside an Office program, which is impractical for more than a fairly small number of files.) And there’s no support for keeping previous versions of items that are edited, which can be enormously valuable when you’re collaborating with people.
