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Live Workspace is an online extension to Microsoft's Office suite, theoretically allowing users to share and collaborate on documents online, in a similar manner to Google Docs.

Unlike the Google service, however, users will need the Office software installed on their PC to create documents.

"Today's announcement moves us further down the path of bringing a software plus services experience to people at home, work and college," says Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division.

"By combining the rich client experience of Microsoft Office

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with flexible, intuitive service offerings, we're providing seamless computing experiences for our 500 million Office users worldwide."

Sadly this morning's beta launch isn't quite as seamless as Microsoft might hope. Two members of the PC Pro office tried repeatedly to upload documents to the service this morning, but were both met with messages stating "File failed to upload. Try again later." Attempts to upload multiple messages, meanwhile, were met with a stuck progress bar.

However, when we tried using the software on a system not behind the company firewall it worked flawlessly, suggesting that Office Live Workspace might require some companies to tweak with their security settings - a problem we've never encountered with other online document repositories.

On the plus side, the interface looks rather smart and there's an Office 2007 plug-in that allows you to download and save documents from within the Office applications.

Let us know how you get on by testing the software at the Office Live Workspace website.