Today is a tremendously exciting day for me. It is the day Office Live Workspace goes live to the public. We’ve been live for a little while internally to make sure things are working as we expect; today we opened the gates for the first set of US-only customers who signed up on our waitlist. As I write this we are gathered for the first time in the launch room, around the Office Live Administration Console. Here a bunch of my equally excited colleagues will over the next few days and weeks slowly open the Office Live Workspace service, first to the United States and soon the rest of the world. With bated breath we just pushed the button to let in the first trickle of customers a few moments back, and with excited anticipation we will watch as this trickle grows into a raging river – we have a lot of people on the waitlist. As we see the service hold up to scale and make any necessary adjustments to keep things running smoothly, we’ll eventually remove the waitlist altogether.
It was in June 2006 when I first learned of the newly formed charter of Office Live Workspace, even though at the time it didn’t have a name. It did, however, have a clear and compelling vision of providing an online productivity service built around simplicity and ease of use, to enable people to publish, organize and access their information from anywhere, and easily share and collaborate with others. I joined the team as the development manager, and as the second member of the team. Over the last 18 months the team has grown as we worked to deliver on this vision. Today is the proud day the effort of the team comes to fruition. We’ve put in a lot of planning and development effort to bring to our customers the best possible online productivity service experience. As we have had people internally use the service recently we’ve gotten a lot of feedback, and it’s great to see the excitement and buzz build up. In this first release we’re also already aware of improvements we can make, and as we go forward we will be working hard to keep listening to our customers and improving the service on a regular and frequent basis.
Thank you for using Office Live Workspace, be sure to let us know what you think, and we hope your experience with it is as much fun as it was for us to build it!
Sam Sengupta