It doesn’t seem that long ago that the Office Live Workspace team formed from great people all across Microsoft (and some colleges around the world, too) to change the face of collaborating on Office documents. We had been hearing from customers for years that they were frustrated with merging multiple versions of the same Excel spreadsheet as it got passed back and forth in long email threads with forked conversations. Other customers had told us about staying late at the office merely to review a few long Word documents that were stored on the company servers. Still others just wanted a way to save some quick notes and lists in their browser that they could share with their spouse to track their household projects. These issues were clearly important for our customers, and we each felt them personally as well. So we came together for a Web 2.0 service that our customers, colleagues, friends, and family could use to be more productive in all facets of life. That passion drove us to rethink the SharePoint user experience for the internet and build what we fondly call, in our Microsoft-love of acronyms, OLW.

Of course, it’s not easy building a brand new product for hundreds of millions of Office customers. Add to that a new team where everyone had to learn each other’s styles and excitedly debate wildly different opinions on such an important project so dear to our hearts, and you get one fun ride. Like any Microsoft team, we have people from around the world. One of us was born and raised as close to the office as Seattle, others are from the east coast (hi mom!) and our neighbor to the north, and still others from as far away as China, India, Russia, England, and many, many other countries around the globe. Fortunately, we formed a tight nit group quickly. Our team grew so fast that our space couldn’t keep up, so we spent much of development with two people to an office, all crammed together in a small section of our building, It was a rare sight at a company where almost everyone gets a private office (hint, hint, apply now to join us!). My boss even got a rare opportunity for someone at his level: he got to share his office with me. Needless to mention, we got to know each other well and maintained that frenzied start up feel.

Through it all, what brought us together was our unified vision for helping customers access their documents anywhere, share them with their friends, using the best in breed integration with the Office applications that we use every day like Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Before the team formed in earnest, we had some early scouts that painted this vision in words and pictures, and I’m still amazed at how close it remains to what we actually implemented.  , Of course, we tweaked our designs and feature set after we did focus groups and surveys with customers across the country, usability studies with customers who live in the Puget Sound area, and actually used the product ourselves,. Sometimes we made big cuts of entire features (if I said which you’d miss them as much as we do), other times we just changed the size of those icons (one of our developers coined the phrase we use to describe them: Fisher-Price buttons). All in all, I’m proud of what we’ve created together, and we’re looking forward to growing our ranks to improve OLW and help more and more customers for years to come.

Ned Friend