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Some Thoughts about the Office Live Workspace

March 4, 2008 |

Office Live Workspace logoMicrosoft today announced the the Office Live Workspace is now publicly available.

‘Lame’ seems to be the word that sums up most of the commentary. Most of the commentators I have seen so far bemoan the fact that it is not, in fact, a version of MS Office packaged as a web app and that it is, if anything, a pretty lame attempt by Microsoft to counter the tide that is Google Apps and Zoho.

After having used it for most of the day while putting some finishing touches to a rather large Word document, I have a slightly different perspective of this, I think.

The Live Workspace does indeed not allow you to edit documents online (though no matter what the cynics might say, I think this is going to be added rather sooner than later). From my perspective, that’s a good thing.

Office Live Workspace is basically a repository for your documents, but you still do the editing in the offline MS Office Suite, after you have downloaded and installed a few minor upgrades to your MS Office Suite which allow you to manage the documents in the Workspace right from your Office applications.

The reason I haven’t started using any of the online suites so far is the simple: the online editors are too simplistic for my current needs.

I need extensive support for footnotes and endnotes. I need integration with my bibliography manager. I want more control over the layout. I need control over margins. I love the commentary function with bubbles for commenting on student papers. I need to be able to do indexes, and cross-references etc., etc., etc.

As of now, the online editors can barely handle footnotes.

I know it’s not the cool thing to say these days, but there is definite value in having desktops apps and combining it with cloud storage.

The addition of cloud storage and versioning with Live Workspace makes things a lot easier for me because I work on different machines at home and at work. With Live Workspace, my documents are always in synch without having to worry about running scripts are any additional software.

In the long run, this might go down in history as a stopgap measure before the whole Office Suite goes online, but for now, its exactly what I need.

p.s. it looks like MS really wants you to sign up for this, because they are giving a hell of a lot of prizes away in their Office Live Sweepstakes….


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3 Comments so far

  1. Glenn Slaven on March 5, 2008 5:27 am

    Couldn’t agree more. Some of the comments are due to anti-desktop sentiment, but I can’t help feeling that a lot if it is good old fashioned anti-Microsoft prejudice. I can’t help feeling that if Sun had come out with a similar service for Open Office there would be a much more positive reception.

  2. Steven Hodson on March 5, 2008 10:58 am

    As to be expected :) I agree with your assessment of needing both a combination of web + desktop - which is the backbone idea behind MS’s SaaS movement (Steve Clayton is the SaaS pointman in England http://blogs.msdn.com/stevecla01/default.aspx).

    It’s not that I don’t think the day will come when the line of capabilities between desktop and web is totally blurred I just don’t agree with the concept for a number of reasons.

    That said I did sign up for the Office Live and when I get some time I’ll look further into it but for the moment I have the same concerns as I do with totally web base apps.

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