New Microsoft Office Live Workspace is a Letdown
Microsoft is opening up the Office Live Workspace Beta to the general public. Anyone with a Live ID can sign up today for free. Of course if you’re planning to actually create and edit documents with Live Workspace, you’ll need to pony up for a licensed copy of Microsoft Office.
We looked at Office Live Workspace when the private beta launched late last year, and found the service lacking in features. Unfortunately the official launch hasn’t done much to improve things — page load times are slow, the interface is clunky and it lacks online editing and collaboration tools.
Despite a handful of new features, Office Live Workspace isn’t a real competitor for online office suites like Zoho and Google Docs. Nor does the service extend the functionality of Microsoft Office in any particularly compelling way.
Which is too bad since Microsoft has a great opportunity to deliver much more, but as it stands now, Office Live Workspace is little more than an online storage service for existing MS Office users.
To actually edit the documents, users will need to have some sort office suite installed on their PCs. Theoretically any office suite will work, but as you would expect, Microsoft says that Office 2007 will work the best. Other key elements of the online interface, like the ability to bulk upload documents, remain Internet Explorer only.
In my testing Office Live Workspace didn’t very work on a Mac and was rather slow even on Windows. Although it’s doubtful that Linux fans would be interested anyway, for the record, no Office Live Workspace doesn’t work with Linux.
As for the collaboration and sharing aspects, don’t expect to find the real-time features of Google Docs or Zoho. Instead Office Live Workspace allows one person to edit at a time. If someone else is working on the file you’ll see a message stating that file is “checked out.” When that person is finished editing, the document is checked back in and then you can access it for further editing.
Depending on your needs, Office Live Workspace may work quite well. For small to medium companies already heavily invested in Microsoft Office products, this might be an easy way to add some (albeit limited) sharing and collaboration features.
However, for the average user, Google Docs and Zoho both offer far more robust features and neither requires additional software for editing documents.
[Screenshot courtesy of Microsoft]
