Hands On: Microsoft Office Live Workspace

Microsoft is synonymous with the ubiquitous Windows operating system. But its Microsoft Office productivity suite pulls in more revenue than any version of Windows. Competition from Web-hosted productivity applications like Google Docs and Zoho Office has changed the rules of the application-suite game, however, threatening Microsoft’s desktop application revenues and forcing it to address the growing popularity of Web-hosted applications with new features and products.

The obvious move would be to offer free, ad-supported, feature-limited online versions of Office’s flagship applications designed to compete head-on with Google’s and Zoho’s word-processing, spreadsheet, and presentation programs. Microsoft’s free Office Live Workspace, however, takes a different tack by providing private and public shared online file areas, or workspaces, that are tightly linked to Office’s desktop applications via a downloadable plug-in.

Office Live Workspace anticipates the kinds of jobs you’re likely to collaborate on, providing prefab workspace templates geared to specific business, school, and home tasks such as organizing a group meeting, launching a product, writing a term paper, throwing a party, or managing a little-league team. Individual templates contain document templates designed for the task, such as a project proposal outline in Word or a presentation in PowerPoint.

Office Live Workspace supports Excel files, too, though none of the templates available when we reviewed the site were Excel files. On the other hand, the service doesn’t support Microsoft’s Access database format, which is too bad–Access users looking to delegate data entry and to simplify reporting tasks might benefit greatly from an online database-sharing arrangement.

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