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Office goes Live

Posted on 30 Mar 2009 at 16:53

Simon Jones finds that, for a freebie, Microsoft's Office Live Workspace is a powerful web storage and sharing tool.

Storing only eight versions of each document seems a little stingy, although it's better than nothing, but beware that each version of a document takes up some of your Cloud storage space, so five versions of a 25MB document would take up a quarter of your 500MB allocation. You get warning messages when you get close to your storage limit and, eventually, you'll be prevented from saving new documents or new versions of documents until you delete some stuff to free up space.

As well as allowing you to share a document or workspace, Live Workspace also allows you to share your screen with up to 15 other people. Based on Microsoft Office Live Meeting and the work done for Windows Vista on Windows Meeting Space, which let you hold virtual meetings within your own network domain, Microsoft SharedView does a similar thing but across the internet. You get to share one or more applications or your entire desktop with the people you invite, and everyone gets their own named pointer so you can tell who's pointing at what. You can give other people control so that they can click or type, and they can even copy and paste from their own PC into your document. In a Word document, anything someone else typed or pasted is treated as a tracked change, and so shows up marked with their name and the date and time. SharedView is another beta test app with a long history - originally codenamed "Tahiti", when you ask for help it takes you to its pages on Microsoft Connect, Microsoft's beta testing website.

Sending invitations to a SharedView session is simple, since it offers you a new email containing the instructions on how to join the session to which you just fill in the recipients' email addresses. Provided that all these participants have a reasonably fast internet connection, this can be a good way of collaborating on a document or demonstrating something. You get a simple instant-messaging applet built into the SharedView toolbar that shows at the top of the screen, but no live audio or video - Microsoft suggests you should use Windows Live Messenger or the telephone if you want those features. There's a couple of things you need to be aware of when using SharedView, one of them being that if you share less than your whole desktop, any window that isn't shared will obscure a shared window, leaving the remote participants staring at a partial window with a big grey hole in it. Another is that since you're sharing applications, not documents, keeping two documents open in Word means that both of them are shared and visible to all participants. You can start SharedView from the Office Live Workspace website or from Word, Excel or PowerPoint because the Office Live Add-In puts extra entries into the application (File) menu to let you share the documents you've opened.

For a freebie, Microsoft Office Live Workspace is a remarkably powerful tool. There are rough edges and it's still in beta after more than a year of operation, but perhaps the recent announcement that Microsoft is going to merge Office Live with Windows Live (at least in the way these are presented to users) will prove the spur the company needs to complete the work. However, interaction with the new web-based version of Office, coming along with Office "14" will also be challenging.

14 Delayed again?

Talking of Office "14" (which Microsoft definitely isn't), it's now more than a month since we were expecting Beta 1 of this next version, and not a squeak has been heard from Redmond. Some unofficial screenshots of an alpha build have leaked onto the internet, but otherwise all is silence. I'm not going to comment on these leaked screenshots, because so much can change between an alpha and the final version that virtually anything I say would likely be wrong or misleading. The latest rumours are that Beta 1 won't now be ready until May, and that either gives Microsoft a very compressed beta cycle to get it out the door this year or, if it follows previous form and takes a year for the beta testing, we won't see the finished product until Q2 2010.