Have you ever arrived at work only to realize you left your thumb drive with your revised presentation at home? Or have you ever wondered if the document you received through an email attachment is the most current? Have there been changes? Work can be very frustrating when were not all on the same page, so to speak. Wouldn’t it be nice to have access to your documents from any computer in the world? As well as sharing files with friends and workmates, in a way that everyone has the most recent version?

These realizations have led to the arena of “cloud computing.” This week I took a look at one of Microsoft’s recent contributions to the cloud world, “Office Live Workspace.” The idea is to be able to access and share your docs with others from anywhere. Can it solve all the headaches mentioned above? It just might. How does it compare with the infamous Google Docs? Is it worth switching a company over to? In short, we’d have to say yes. There are some definite advantages to this sort of workspace.

For starters it’s free and setup is painless, less than 5 minutes and I was ready to go. Once you have your “Windows Live ID” you are ready to get started. First you need to create a “Workspace.” Try looking at that in a similar way to folders on your computer. You can have a “Workspace” for each one of your projects. There are quite a few Templates that you can choose from. In each of the templates there are a few documents to help get you started on your project, or you can just go with a plain old blank workspace.

Once you have created a “Workspace,” then you can add your documents. The “Notes, List, Task, Contact and Event” documents are all editable in your browser. However, “Word, Excel and PowerPoint” documents can only be edited on your computer. This means that if you don’t have Microsoft Office, this is not going to work for you.

In order to start editing, you will need to download/install a small update to Office. It is a bit of an ordeal, but once installed, it works flawlessly! Then when you save the document on your computer, it will be instantly uploaded and refreshed in the browser window. If you have Office 2003 products you will see a new toolbar giving you option to “Save to” or “Open from” Office Live.

In Office 2007 you will see these two options on the “Office Button” menu. There are a few bugs that have been variously reported, but Microsoft seems to have work-arounds which you can find here.

All of the documents that I tested appeared identical in the browser. There was no noticeable loss of formatting.  The one drawback to saving “online” is that you are not simultaneously saving a local file for offline use. In order to do that you need to save a separate file to your computer for that. This of course negates the advantage of only having one document.

I have friends in several countries and time zones with whom I regularly share documents. Instead of having to attach it to an email and send it each time I make a change to the original, I just “Save to Office Live,” and the document is immediately viewable online. Anyone whom I have chosen to “Share” this document with gets an email alerting them to the update.

Additionally, you can specify who has “Editing” rights or simply “Viewing.” Even those who can only “View,” can add comments about the document and all will also receive email notification. This could be a very useful tool. There is also an option for “Open” viewing rights for everyone.

With “Shareview” you can share not only the document, but also a screen! You can have up to 15 people viewing and taking turns “editing” the document on the same screen. It can also be used as a remote desktop application for other programs as well. I can already hear the conference calls being booked.

You may be wondering how it compares with “Google Docs.” I have used “Google Docs” a bit, but without an extensive review I can give this brief comparison:

Conclusion:

Many Google Doc users are users because they hate Microsoft Office. Many of them will not want to utilize Office Live. However, they have to face the demons of Google Docs also, and those are aplenty. Overall, Office Live is a great free resource and the postive feautures outweigh the negative. It is still Beta, so maybe some of the quirks will be worked out. We can expect to see some evolvement in this field of “cloud” computing. In the meantime, it is off to a pretty good start with Microsoft Office Live.
The Good: Free. Easy to use. Enormous real world application potential

The Bad: Not Safari or iPhone friendly. No online editing. Local files are not automatically synced.