Should you use Office Live Workspace?
- How many times have you arrived home without emailing yourself the copy of the slide deck you need to present tomorrow morning?
- How many times have you had to email the proposal to your manager, he makes corrections and sends it back, you make more corrections and send it back to him..yawn. Then of course, you keep all the versions of the proposal in case you revert to an earlier version which you back up.
- How many times have you had discussing an assignment over the phone only to realize both of you are looking at different versions of the document?
We all get it - The value prop for Office Live Workspace is go anywhere and still access your documents. I can now upload my documents to my workspace, share it with my team, go to Mexico, lounge in the sun (sigh), then walk into the nearest Internet cafe with my tourist hat on, just log in with my Live ID and then view the document, even if Office is not installed. I then see my team has gone to town with their comments and I have to rewrite parts of it. I click Edit, open the document in Word, make the tweaks and save it back. I can now go back to sip my cold mango juice by the beach while my team reviews this updated document.
But should you use Office Live Workspace?
1) Are you an Office user at work? Everything you use Office for – whether it’s at Home or work. Note: Office 2007 SP1 users, we are in the process of updating our Addin to work for you so watch this space.
2) Are you a student? If you are a student, I want you to be using OLW. Why? You attend classes with new groups, you want to send in that lab report, your professor uses OLW to store grades. We have already allowed students from some selected schools (www.sharingu.com) to have access to OLW. Try it out!
3) Are you in an Association?: Book Club, Home Association, Sports Club – you can even use our preexisting workspace templates.
4) Are you planning a reunion or an extended trip? Try out our Events Lists and Notes to make plans and share with your family for a unified look at plans.
There are more examples here (http://workspace.officelive.com/Examples) but feel free to tell us why you use OLW by posting on the forums/blog.
Top of mind for the team today:
1) Sign in issues: We discovered an issue with how we allow folks into the service. Some of you might receive “Your Workspace is ready” but then cannot access. If that’s the case, check out the forums at http://officeliveworkspacecommunity.com/ or contact Support and provide the Live ID you are using. Or check out the screencast I made addressing that subject:
a. Signing up for workspace
b. Workspace service first time sign in
c. Kavitha's workspace issue screencast
2) Get more folks into the service:
a. We want to be sure that those who get into the service have the best experience. Wouldn’t it suck to be able to log in and then see limited availability to your account? We have made some very good guesses and tradeoffs and as we are getting more confident as the days go by. Watch out for your turn coz its coming!
We are excited! Are you?
Kavitha Radhakrishnan