Using Office Live Workspace for Collaboration

Office Live Workspace is a free file sharing and online storage solution from Microsoft. You can use Office Live Workspace to collaborate on Web-based documents, notes, spreadsheets, presentations, and lists. It is built on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and comes with 5 GB of storage limit and maximum file size allowed is 25 MB. USPs are:

• Access your documents from almost anywhere
• Save over 10,000 Microsoft Office files in one online place
• Open and save directly from Word, Excel, and Powerpoint
• Control who sees and edits files; password-protected sharing

When to use Office Live Workspace?  

Consumers/Students can use Office Live Workspace (OLW) as online storage for their work and sharing it with family and friends, planning trips and events etc.

Enterprise users have lot of options from Microsoft for fulfilling their file sharing/collaboration needs and so they need to evaluate their requirements against the OLW feature set and identify specific scenarios where this service can be leveraged. It's a great product for small enterprises who can leverage it to collaborate internally and also externally with their customers, partners and vendors and all this without any hardware infrastructure and cost.

The Choosing an External Collaboration Solution guide from Microsoft helps you choose which Microsoft collaboration option is appropriate for your organization, given your specific requirements. The following table from the guide compares various collaboration solutions against typical considerations and requirements for an external collaboration solution:

Is it Secure?

• Provides Virus protection using Microsoft Forefront Security for SharePoint
• Workspace/Files can only be accessed with a Windows Live ID and password
• You control who can view, comment on, and edit your documents for collaboration.
• You manage permissions and decide whether someone has access to a single document or an entire workspace 

How to Start?

1. Goto the Office Live Workspace website at https://workspace.officelive.com/ and click on the "Get Started Now" button.
2. Enter you email address and click "Next"
3. Fill the details in the "Create Your Account" screen and hit "Finish".
4. A welcome message is sent from Office Live Workspace to the email address you entered. Click the first link in the e-mail message to verify your account

You are ready to start the file sharing now :-)

Related Downloads

• Office Live Update 1.3: add-in lets you access workspaces from Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
• Microsoft SharedView: fast and easy way to share documents and screen views with small groups of friends or coworkers; anytime, anywhere

Want to Learn more?

Refer to following links for more information on Office Live Workspace and how to use it

• Frequently Asked Questions 
• Office Live Workspace Blog
• Office Live Workspace Wiki
• Office Live Workspace Videos 

Future

Microsoft has announced plans to deliver Office Web applications – lightweight versions of Office – through web browsers to consumers through Office Live (ref: Microsoft to Extend Office to the Browser) in Office 14 release timeframe.

Quoting Microsoft Senior Vice President Chris Capossela – “… As part of the next release of Office, we’re announcing that Microsoft will deliver Office Web applications - lightweight versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote - through a browser. With these new applications, people can use a browser to create, edit, and collaborate on Office documents…” and “…We will deliver Office Web applications to consumers through Office Live, which is a consumer service with both ad-funded and subscription offerings. For business customers, we will offer Office Web applications as a hosted subscription service and through existing volume licensing agreements …”

In the next 2 blog posts, I will cover some OLW features and Office integration available.