Workspace Team Blog

Your comments matter? Doh!

Post — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:33:00 GMT

By Roni Burd, OLW Program Manager

This is my first blog post. I joined the team and Microsoft very recently, so I’m just an average Joe here. Not so long ago I used to be on the other side of the fence, using software for everyday things, so I’ll try to write as openly as I can about my experience.

The first thing I wanted to talk about is the people who spend time in our forums asking us questions, describing their frustrations and suggesting new ideas. A lot of that feedback, believe it or not, goes into making our product better. Trust me; I’m not drinking the Kool-Aid yet. I’m always surprised and humbled by it, because I have never participated in forums like this before.

We really read the posts and consider the changes you send. Although we may not be as fast as you want us to be in making those changes, we sure take notice. We’ve seen a lot of great ideas that we evaluate and try to address in future iterations. It’s harder than it looks to satisfy everyone, but it is definitely our goal. We (by we, I mean the OLW team and I) like to think that OLW is pretty good at achieving this goal so far, but we are reminded that we sometimes fail. People actually fight when we deliberate making the code cleaner or delivering a better UI. Obviously, by looking at your comments the discussion tilts in your favor.

There you have it. I had to start somewhere, right, so those are my first thoughts. Hopefully next time I can talk to you about something more interesting. I have no idea what it is yet, but I’m sure I’ll think of something!

Roni Burd, OLW Program Manager

Go Green!

Post — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:21:00 GMT

by Susan Woodside, Team Editor

Hi, I’m the team editor for the Office Live Workspace User Assistance team. One of the reasons I’m excited about Office Live Workspace is that it’s a service that can replace the many pieces of paper we need to manage our busy lives with online documents that we can share with others. Remember the “paperless office?” I look at the piles of paper on my desk, and on the desks of the other editors in my office, and see that dream hasn’t arrived yet. Office Live Workspace is a step in the right direction.

Let’s look at the pile next to my skull mug pencil holder. On top is a tuition bill for my son, away at school. He printed this off of his school’s Web site (they don’t mail bills to parents anymore). I have to put in a request for funds from our 529 account, see how we’re doing budget-wise, and remember to pay the bill on time. I created a new workspace called “University of Washington expenses” using the Blank workspace template. Now, my son, his grandmother in Michigan, and my husband can keep track of tuition and living expenses, as well as due dates and account numbers.

Next in the stack is a printed e-mail message from a friend with information about trip insurance… I’m going on the first cruise of my life this summer, and we are doing research about visa requirements, shore excursions, laundry on the ship. To keep all of this information organized in one place, I created a Travel workspace and shared it with my travel companions. The Travel workspace contains a number of documents, including packing and travel checklists, that you can modify to meet your needs. You can also add documents about your other travel research. For more information, see Use lists to track and share contacts, events, and tasks.

In case anyone thinks that none of my clutter is work-related, paper number three is a note showing the date for my presentation to my team about Office Live terminology. This is on my Outlook calendar, and I have some hand-outs that I’ll pass out to my group. To keep track of everyone’s presentations, we use a group workspace spreadsheet, Sign up for your demo.

Is my office paper-free yet? No, but we’re finding better ways to share information, and finding that workspaces help to give those buried bits exposure to the people who can benefit. For more ideas about how to save paper with Office Live Workspace, see the article Go green: 5 ways to reduce paper using Office Live Workspace.

Are workspaces helping you in an unexpected way? Let me know….

Susan Woodside, Team Editor

Is e-mail over-rated now that Workspace exists?

Post — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:00:00 GMT

by Nicole Richard, Marketing Manager

Using Office Live Workspace is starting to make me wonder if I can forego e-mail altogether. Well, maybe I won’t go that far, but I’m starting to wonder: is e-mail now over-rated in the digital age?

When I’m working with a team of people on a project, each person has their own set of comments or feedback. Documents get sent by e-mail back and forth. Then I have to review each edit and either accept or reject the change. Sometimes there are multiple changes from multiple people and keeping tracking of each change can be difficult. My other problem is that there have been those times when I get the annoying messages that my mailbox is almost at its storage limit due to multiple large files. I then spend time sifting through my e-mail and trying to decide what to keep, what to permanently delete, and what to save. Wasn’t e-mail in the beginning supposed to increase productivity?

Since I started using Office Live Workspace, I have found that these small, everyday challenges have started to slowly disappear. By having everyone share one working version that’s kept in one place, I don’t have multiple versions, multiple changes, and I don’t become victim of losing track of which version I am working on. I also haven’t had a “mailbox over the size limit” message in several months since I don’t have as many e-mail attachments! I’m using my workspace in so many different ways now that I don’t know how I got along without it before. J

I guess the last question is: What do I use it for? Obviously I use it at work to coordinate feedback from stakeholders both within the workspace team and outside vendors on projects that I manage. Outside of work though, I run our neighborhood “community spirit committee” and plan and manage all of the events. There are many things that require help and input from other people, and by storing all of the event related documents, each member of the committee has access and can make updates at any time from any location. At home, we use it to track our monthly budget and of course I have my “honey do” list for my husband. One of my neighbors that I introduced to Workspace is now using it to track the snack schedule of her son’s little league team. As with all new things, it has taken some training and reminding of people that I work with – but now that they have gotten used to the concept of an online shared workspace, all of us stay much more up to date and can focus on other things.

Several people have shared their stories of how they use Workspace in the community, and I wanted you to see how a couple used it to plan a wedding and a move to London. And then there’s the story of how a small business called Mind Dragon has been using it throughout the company to keep everyone on the same page.

After all this talk of sharing a workspace and working with others online, if you need a quick tip on how you can start sharing – here’s a quick how-to video that we created that will show you exactly how to share an individual document or how to share a workspace.

Get started today with your own workspace or log in to your workspace to start working with others on your family projects, fun trips, or “honey do” lists. Happy sharing!

Nicole Richard, Marketing Manager

Announcing the Office Live Workspace Grand Prize Winner

Post — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 10:00:00 GMT

We are very excited to announce the grand prize winner of the Office Live Workspace sweepstakes that kicked off when the service launched on March 4, 2008. David Austin, a Seattle-based graduate student in the Library and Information Science program at the University of Washington, has been awarded the $100,000 grand prize. Austin was selected randomly from a pool of hundreds of thousands of entries. He plans to use the $100,000 toward funding his graduate education, and may put money toward a down payment on a house in the future.

Participants entered for a chance to win by signing up for their own Workspace, and earned up to two bonus entries by uploading their first document to their Office Live Workspace account and the first time they shared a document or Workspace with others. The winner could use the grand prize to fund a favorite charity, an education or build a business - the choice was up to them.

The anywhere access to documents that Office Live Workspace provided was an attractive feature for Austin: "I was drawn to the portability and access to my documents, even when I didn't have my laptop with me, so signed up for it as soon as I heard about it," he said. "I currently use the Office Live Workspace to keep my work schedule and school papers - both Word and Excel files - in one safe place. I plan to use this service even more in my grad program next year as I work on projects that will require me to share and collaborate on Office documents with others."

David's Workspace

In total, an assortment of more than 30,000 daily and weekly prizes were given away as part of the sweepstakes, including Xbox 360 Elite Video Game Systems, Samsung Blackjack II Smartphone devices, 30GB Zune players, Expedia hotel and package coupons and Microsoft Office Professional 2007.

Start using your own free Workspace by visiting: http://www.workspace.officelive.com/. Contribute to the Office Live Workspace forum and provide your feedback at http://www.officeliveworkspacecommunity.com/.

Your feedback is critical

Post — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 13:22:00 GMT

After we released Office Live Add-in v1.0, we listened hard to your feedback both through the community forums and our Support team. What we heard is that you liked the Office Live Add-in but that there was room for improvement in these areas:

Opening a document from my workspace has too many credential prompts.
Opening a document takes too much time.
You need a “clean machine” for the integration to work well. Otherwise, it sometimes doesn’t seem to work and gives blank file dialog boxes.

Our investigation

As we looked into these issues, we found a couple of interesting things:

1) The behavior of the integration is highly dependent on the version of OS and Office installed.

Vista and Office 2007 behave very differently than other OS/Office configurations, which explains why some of you are seeing behavior that others don’t. Office Live Workspace uses Office dlls and network stacks within the OS in order for the integration to work, and these differences cause our integration to behave differently, such as how many times you get prompted for your credentials within Office. On XP, you need to click “Open” or “Save” for the dialog to pull in the workspace view whereas in Vista, the workspace view gets pulled into the File dialog automatically.

2) Performance partly depends on how long the OS and the service “communicate” on getting valid credentials for that user.

If we make multiple roundtrips to the service, it takes longer (and this is dependent on #1). When this fails, for various reasons such as network access issues or Live ID mismatch issues, you might see the blank dialog.

3) Clean machines shouldn’t be required. Period.

You are absolutely right. What you were probably seeing is a manifestation of #1 and #2 above. We are aware of one issue with the Visual Studio 20008 Web Authoring Component which, if installed, can cause your update to fail. While the workaround is to uninstall the VS component from the Control Panel, we are working on updating our install to circumvent this issue.

Finding a solution for you

One of the primary challenges is that we are installing bits into and integrating with products that have released, Office XP/2003/2007. As a result, we have constraints on what we can and cannot change (not to mention the code base is HUGE!) So we had to figure out exactly what was happening, why it was happening, repro the issues exactly, and then work with the experts to find fixes without breaking Office or Windows. Whew, no small task!

We have good news

We have taken all of the findings and with the help of the Office and Windows teams come up with a solution that closely delivers on our primary goal – to make integration as seamless as possible. We can now present to you a single package available as a single download, the “Office Live Update 1.1” which:

Installs the necessary performance updates so that we don’t make roundtrips, and makes the network stacks “smart” so they do the right thing for OLW
Installs the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant that ensures that logging into the browser essentially logs you in to Office, so you don’t get prompted again and again
Installs the new Office Live Add-in v1.1 which shows who you are logged in as right there in the menu flyout.

We have made this available in all our new international languages, too. Let us know how this works for you, as we are still working on further improvements. And, as always, we thank you for taking the time to provide your feedback because it really helps us get better.

Kavitha

Share and collaborate with others around the world!

Post — Wed, 28 May 2008 20:59:00 GMT

Oli Messenger, Program Manager

I’m happy to announce that Office Live Workspace is now available in 4 additional languages: French, German, Japanese and Spanish.

All features of the product are available in those language flavors, which means you can now share and collaborate with users around the world in many different countries and markets. Best of all, you don’t have to worry about a thing because OLW makes sharing a file or document with someone that speaks another language just as simple as sharing with anyone else. Users will see their workspaces and user interface in their language of choice, and all content will naturally be in the language it was created or written in. Say you’re from London and you share with someone from Paris. The French user gets notified as you’d expect, and the next time they log in to their account they’ll see that the English user has shared the files with them. It’s as simple as that.

Our selection of pre-made workspace templates has also been localized, so international users get exactly the same benefits from them as English users have had. It’s now possible to collaborate as part of an international team of people, with edits being recorded and activity being tracked and sent out world-wide, keeping everyone in the loop. Users see times translated into their time zones and see dates, times, and numbers formatted to their locales. For users, it’s seamless. Office Live Workspace handles all translation and adaptation under the covers.

Look to us to release in more languages over the coming months, and be sure to give us feedback on any part of the product including our internationalization.

Cheers,

Oli Messenger, Program Manager

Bienvenue Willkommen Bienvenido ようこそ

Post — Tue, 20 May 2008 13:00:00 GMT

Launching an online service Internationally is a challenging as well as very satisfying experience. You overcome a wide variety of challenges ranging from linguistic aspects to technical complexities, to make it happen. But when you do it, you look back with pride on the difference you made in a customer's life, thousands of miles away.

Today, we are announcing the release of Office Live Workspace beta in four additional languages - French, German, Japanese & Spanish. If you are an online user of one of these four languages, we will bring that language experience of Office Live Workspace to you, wherever you live. We have also made some key improvements to the Office Live Add-in, now called the Office Live Update, in response to feedback we received.

We look forward to supporting additional languages later this year. Your feedback is invaluable and helps us serve your needs better, so don't hesitate to participate in the community forums.

From a team that is passionate about online services and international users, a warm welcome to the world of Office Live Workspace!

Merci Danke Gracias ありがとうございました

New Video: Use it with Microsoft Office

Post — Fri, 16 May 2008 21:34:00 GMT

Video: Microsoft Office Live Workspace beta: Extend Microsoft Office

New Video: Share easily with others

Post — Fri, 16 May 2008 21:31:00 GMT

Video: Microsoft Office Live Workspace beta: Share with others

New Activity features let you see and learn about workspace changes

Post — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:15:00 GMT

Avi

Program Manager

Office Live Team

As part of our recent update, we released two new features to help you keep tabs on your workspaces – the Activity pane and activity e-mails. As the Program Manager for these features, I’d like to quickly explain their purpose, and provide some tips to enhance your collaboration experience in Office Live Workspace.

Each workspace that you share – or that is shared with you – is more than just a place to store your files. It’s a social experience, a network of editors and reviewers working together on a single set of documents. The Activity pane exposes the underlying social network behind every workspace. By capturing and exposing every event – from sharing invitations to document revisions – it tells the story of what’s happened in the workspace. At a glance, you can easily see who’s been working (or not!), what files have been changed or added to, and what’s being discussed.

As a complement to the Activity pane, we added e-mail notifications to alert you in real time about changes to your workspace. Figuring out when to send notifications was a tricky problem. We wanted to let you know quickly about changes that were made without filling your inbox with excessive or redundant messages or making you wade through a sea of checkboxes and settings.

In the end, we decided the best solution was to simply let you determine exactly how often you receive activity e-mails. When you share or join a workspace, you will receive one activity e-mail for the first change since your last visit. You will not receive another notification until after the next time you visit the workspace. Additionally, in order to limit the number of messages, you can receive a maximum of one e-mail per workspace per 24-hour period.

Want to take a break from workspace notifications? If you don’t view it, you won’t receive any e-mails. Signing in every few hours to view revisions? You won’t receive redundant e-mails. You can also turn off activity e-mails altogether by deselecting the checkbox at the bottom of the activity pane.

Finally, as these features are relatively new, we’d love to hear your feedback! There have already been a few posts on the forums about activity e-mails, so keep them coming. We’d like to know how you’re using them right now and how you’d like to see them improve as we roll out new functionality.

See you on the forums!

Avi

The Workspace Kids

Post — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 16:37:00 GMT

I was recently in New York to launch Office Live Workspace to the world. It was a significant milestone for the product so we also kicked off a sweepstakes where the grand prize is $100,000 and over 30,000 other prizes will be given away.

For the launch we invited Doug Ellin, creator and executive producer of the HBO series Entourage, as well as executive producer Rob Weiss and star Jeremy Piven to join us at the event. With the writing process being so collaborative we felt the Entourage guys would benefit from using Office Live Workspace.

For me it was a surreal experience hanging out with these guys. Jeremy Piven has been in some of my favorite movies like Black Hawk Down and Old School not to mention he plays Ari Gold masterfully in Entourage. As for Doug Ellin and Rob Weiss, they are the real genius behind Entourage, which is one of the hottest shows on television.

I didn’t know what to expect, were they going to be Hollywood prima donnas? After meeting them I can tell you they were so down to earth and genuine. I had an absolute blast working with them. You can check out my interview with them on MSN.

The day started when the guys came down to Twelve21. I showed them Office Live Workspace and we talked about how they could use it.

Doug Ellin started things off by saying he uses Microsoft Office Word to write all his scripts on his Mac. As we talked about the writing process Doug mentioned that there are sometimes 30 or more different versions of the script before they get to the final one. He said it was difficult to keep track of the latest version of the script.

When I walked through the demo of Office Live Workspace they became really excited about how easy it was to work on one online copy of the document and the service would keep track of the different versions. They also liked how easy it was to share a script and control editors and viewers. But the icing on the cake was the ability to access Office Live Workspace from any computer, even on their Macs.

Rob Weiss called Office Live Workspace a “virtual writer’s room” (just so you know he coined the term first) where it gave everyone a chance to collaborate throughout the writing process.

Jeremy Piven, self-described “caveman” when it comes to technology, saw it as an opportunity to be a part of the writing process. Instead of him doing a lot of improv on the set he could explore his ideas with Doug and Rob collaboratively in a workspace.

Later that night we turned Twelve21 into a hot NYC club and had a party to celebrate our launch. People were enjoying their cocktails, dancing to DJ Sky Nellor, and signing up for Office Live Workspace on laptops. Oh, and beautiful people were everywhere.

It turns out I know a lot more models than I thought. Thanks to my friend, Hana Soukupova, for coming and making the event much more glamorous. I think she made people think they were at Fashion Week not a Microsoft party.

Overall it was a terrific launch event and everyone had a great time.

Focus: Publishing Help Topics

Post — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:56:00 GMT

As the user assistance writer for Office Live Workspace, my mission is to predict potential pitfalls customers may experience as they explore all of the features in Office Live Workspace. Divining customer needs requires some speculation based on my own experience with a feature, as well as interpretation of usability studies, tester feedback, page metrics, and customer gripes and suggestions noted in blogs and surveys.

Armed with this data, I then create help topics that provide quick and pertinent answers to customer questions. My goal, ironically, is to ensure that our customers spend minimal time scouring help topics to become unblocked from a task, and more time soaking up a satisfying experience as they use Office Live Workspace.

So, do you think I’m reaching my goal? Check out some recently published help topics that explain how to upload multiple documents, share links to workspaces and documents, and manage your workspace with the new Activity pane.

Then, scroll to the bottom of a help topic and provide feedback using the Was this information helpful? survey buttons. Or respond to this blog with suggestions or requests for new help topics. I’m all ears and poised to make immediate changes to improve your workspace experience.

Workspace available publically world-wide in English today

Post — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:49:00 GMT

Recently, my sister in India, was switching jobs after 11 years with the same company. She wanted to take all her personal documents, ranging from resume, contact list, Intl trip information for various countries, event management documents, school work etc. from her work PC to her home computer. Her solution was to email herself and her husband most of the documents. The remainder of the documents went in a thumb drive, which she bought specifically for this purpose. She chuckled 'I wish it was easier to keep all this in one place and be able to get to it from anywhere.'

Now I am delighted to have an answer for her – Office Live Workspace!

Today, we are announcing the public availability of Office Live Workspace to English-speaking users worldwide. With this, English-speaking users can use this service for free and access and share their documents and other information online anywhere globally. We look forward to adding additional languages this year too!

On another note, last night in New York , in advance of the worldwide availability announcement, Jeremy Piven, actor and star of the TV show Entourage, along with Entourage’s series creator and executive producers, made an appearance at Microsoft's New York City lounge to 'test drive’ the new technology and give a live demonstration of how an episode could be written using Microsoft Office Live Workspace.

Finally, we’re proud that the early beta has been chosen by the editors of CNET Webware.com as a finalist in the 2008 Webware 100 Awards. If you’ve enjoyed beta testing Office Live Workspace so far, please let us know by voting at:

http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100/2008/vote_prod.html?compid=103408

Thanks for all the great feedback. We hope new users from other parts of the globe will let us know what you like and don’t like in the community forums!

Workspace Sweepstakes, too good

Post — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 21:55:00 GMT

Well every once-in-awhile something comes along that seems too good to be true but REALLY IS TRUE! This is one of those times.

Today we announced the WW English availability of Office Live Workspace and the kickoff of our sweepstakes, which will award $100,000 to one lucky winner. Now you can get access to an incredible product that lets you –

Post documents and files to your own private online area
Access them from home, work, school, an Internet café or from almost anywhere you have an Internet connection
Invite whoever you want from wherever they are into your space – you decide who can view and edit your stuff
And you can even share your screen with others in real-time enabling your selected group to get things done together in one place at the same time no matter where you each are

This is truly cool stuff. And get this – it’s completely free. No strings attached. I kid you not.

And it gets better.

When you sign up for an Office Live Workspace you are entered for a chance to win $100,000 that you can use to pay for an education, start a business, donate to a charity. Your choice. Plus, we’re awarding over 30,000 other prizes. Yes, 30,000 - including Xbox 360® Elite Video Game Systems, Samsung™ Blackjack II Smartphone devices, 30-gigabyte Zunes, Expedia® Hotel and Package Coupons, Office® Professional 2007 and numerous other prizes. A ton of great stuff!

So that’s the deal. A great free product that I bet you’ll love. A chance to win over 30,000 super sweet prizes including $100,000. No strings attached.

Check it out at http://officeliveoffers.com/Workspace/sweepstakes/ and sign up today. You’ll be glad you did.

Scott

(Legal stuff, just in case:- NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Open only to legal residents of 50 US (includes DC) 18+. Sweepstakes ends at 11:59 p.m. ET on May 11, 2008. Official Rules. Opt-out here. Winner notification will be sent by prizenotification@officeliveworkspacesweepstakes.com and you must respond within 3 days to claim your Daily and Overall Prize Period prizes.)

Update to Office Live Workspace

Post — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 23:16:00 GMT

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