Microsoft Opens Beta Of Office Live WorkspaceMicrosoft Opens Beta Of Office Live Workspace

Microsoft's Office Live Workspace, the company's latest foray into the world of Web-based office productivity, is going live.

The company will gradually pull the cover off the document sharing application, first to pre-registrants, starting on Monday. Office Live Workspace lets people store, share, and collaborate on Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents online. A sister app, SharedView, lets people share desktops and work together on Office documents in real-time.

While Microsoft is perceived as a late starter in the world of Web-based collaborative productivity, it still dominates the office productivity market and online competitors like Google have yet to make any real inroads with the general public.

However, Office Live Workspace is still a humble beginning for the online functionality that will likely find itself imbedded into the fabric of Office itself in the future. It's not a full, online suite of Office applications, but rather a set of collaborative tools meant to work with the Office client apps.

Office Live Workspace also is one of the better examples of where Microsoft is headed with its "software plus services" strategy that aims partially to blend desktop and Web functionality together in Microsoft applications. The application embeds a toolbar item into client-side Office apps that allows users to save to Office Live Workspace directly from Word, for example, and it also uses the Web for storage and comments while leaving most of the actual editing to the client.

Microsoft since October has been testing Office Live Workspace at several universities, including the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Washington, and Vanderbilt. The feedback the company got led to some tweaks of Office Live Workspace's user interfaces and upgraded performance. Though the beta will be public, Microsoft has not yet publicly set a final release date for the product.