The cool thing about building software services on the web is that you can deliver surprises (hopefully pleasant ones!) to your customers without asking them to install new software or change the way they work.
Today is one of those days for Office Live Workspace as we “go live” with our first feature update since we launched last December. We listened to the great feedback and suggestions you made over the last few months and here’s what you’ll find when you use your Office Live Workspace today:
- A new Activity pane to help you keep track of what’s happening in your workspaces and email notifications so you always know when the people you share with make updates. This feature is a lot of fun and makes it easy to see at glance the changes happening in your workspace and in individual documents. Now you’ll know when someone comments on your document, adds a note, or updates an important list.
- New support for adding multiple documents to your workspaces. The Add multiple documents button makes it is easier than ever to bring your documents into a workspace by browsing and selecting files from your computer or dragging and dropping files on the document uploader.
- New permalinks for sharing direct hyperlinks to your workspaces and documents. Now you can bookmark individual workspaces and items in your workspace using the “add to favorites” tool in your web browser or copy the address bar and paste those links into emails to share with others.
- A new Share workspace UI to easily invite others to your workspace. With the improved address book buttons you can quickly add people from your Windows Live addresses book (contacts from Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger) and people you have shared with before. You can also include more details in your invitation with the larger message box and choose to CC yourself on the invitation.
Of course we also made a bunch of other little fixes and improvements, such as long Comments, and for our Vista users, we have an update to the Office Live Add-in which supports Microsoft Office 2007 SP1. We appreciate all the feedback we’ve heard from you since Office Live Workspace launched and hope you like what you see today. Let us know what you think!
Rob