Microsoft Office Live Workspace is another spin off using the Office Live brand name, with the ‘original’ Office Live service, which offers the hosted service to allow company to create a professional online presence without worry about domain names, web hosting, web design, email accounts, site promotion, and tools to manage customers and projects, has been re-branded as Office Live Small Business.
Windows Live Workspace meanwhile is dubbed as online extension of Microsoft Office suites and products. The main difference between Office Live Small Biz and Office Live Workspace is that the prior is for small businesses to take their business online while the later for all Office users to share their home, office or school works online.
Office Live Workspace (workspace.office.live.com) is essentially a free online file sharing and hosting service that focus on Microsoft Office files – Word documents, Excel workbooks, PowerPoint presentations, and of course, pictures, images, graphics and some other popular formats such as Acrobat .PDF files. Users can save, access, and share documents and files uploaded into the workspace by just using the web browser (probably only Internet Explorer).
Features of Office Live Workspace
Save 1000+ Microsoft Office documents in one place
Access them from almost any computer with a Web browser
Invite people to your workspace for sharing
You control who can view, comment, and edit your documents
Stop manually merging versions from multiple people
Open and save files directly from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
Synchronize contact, task, and event lists with Outlook
No need to learn a new program
Office Live website has a list of examples (dead link) explaining the possible use of Office Live Workspace in your daily life. Microsoft says Office Live Workspace can store 1000+ documents and files, depending on files size. Take an conservative yet generous file size estimate of 250KB each which is properly enough for Office documents with few pages length and few attached pictures, Office Live Workspace likely offers 250MB in free online storage space.
Office Live Workspace hasn’t been launched. It will be released in beta stage initially, and users who intends to sign up as the pioneer users need to pre-register for an invite. Pre-registration for invite can be done here (Windows Live ID required) (no longer available). The invitation to use Office Live Workspace will be sent once Workspace is ready in the next few weeks for pre-registrants from US, according to Workspace Team Blog (no longer valid).
Update: Microsoft Office Live Workspace is no longer available and is replaced with Microsoft OneDrive service (Office 365).
LK is a technology writer for Tech Journey with background of system and network administrator. He has be documenting his experiences in digital and technology world for over 15 years.Connect with LK through Tech Journey on Facebook, Twitter or Google+.
