Office Live Workspaces is now in public beta for anyone with a Live account.  The concept is very much the same as Google Docs, it gives you a space to store & share Office documents online. Unlike Google Docs, you can’t edit documents online, you still require a copy of Office.

From the Workspaces page you can download a little plugin app that will allow Office to talk to Live Workspaces.  The cool thing about this is that you can save documents to Workspaces directly from the Office Application. Fortunately you don’t need a copy of Office2007: Office XP SP3 and up will allow you to open and save documents to & from Workspaces. There are some limitations for the earlier versions of Office around Outlook Contact lists. 

What it does do:

1. Open an office document online in read-only mode
2. Create documents in Word, Excel & PowerPoint and save directly to Workspaces, or open a document from Workspaces for editing.
3. Create Event, Contact and Task lists in Workspaces and sync it with Outlook (in Outlook 2007 you can modify the lists in Outlook and have those changes reflected online, in earlier versions it’s read only). These can be edited online inside Workspaces too.
4. Create ‘Lists’, which are essentially static spreadsheets without the functions.  These can be exported to Excel (using the Sharepoint connector).
5. Create ‘Notes’.  Essentially text files with a WYSIWYG editor online.
6. You can upload pdf documents and view them in read-only online. Sort of.  It renders the whole document as an image, so you can’t select the text.  Also the fonts aren’t all right, and the colours go a bit strange.  Example:  this is the top of my latest telco bill in normal pdf & then what it looks like in Live Workspaces:
   
7. You can upload pretty much any sort of document and it will try and render it for viewing (text, images, etc).
8. Uploads are asynchronous. You can keep doing other things inside Workspaces while it is uploading the document you selected to add.
9. File versioning & comments.  Every time you save a document to a Workspace a note is attached to the file in the Activity panel showing who saved it and when.
10. Sharing.  You can share documents, you can share Workspaces and you can share screens (using SharedView).  You can choose to share with read or write access, and people don’t even have to be logged into Windows Live to view the shared documents.

What it doesn’t do:

1. As I said, you can’t edit Office documents online, you need to open them in the desktop Office application to do that
2. It doesn’t even try to render unknown file formats, it just chucks up an error saying cannot be viewed in Web page format. Click Save As to download all to your desktop and use the appropriate program to open it. There is also a list of file types that won’t be uploaded for security reasons.
3. It doesn’t show the file’s extension in the documents list, just the file name with the extension stripped off.  This is fine if it’s a format it knows about, because it shows a little icon for that document, but for all others it just shows a blank document icon. I imagine this will get really annoying if you have different types of documents with the same name.  You can hover over the name of the file & it will show a fancy tooltip with info about the file and some actions.
   
4. I’ve run a few tests & come up with a list of what does & doesn’t render online (all in read-only mode):
   

   File Type	Renders Online
   Adobe PDF	Yes
   Word Document	Yes
   Excel Spreadsheet	Yes
   PowerPoint Presentation	Yes
   XML File	No
   Text File	Yes
   JPG/BMP/GIF/PNG (8 & 24 bit)	Yes
   CSV Files	No
   HTML	Yes
   Any unknown extension	No

   This isn’t an exhaustive list, just what I’ve observed so far. 

The AJAXed up interface is shiny, it feels very polished for a beta release.  I threw quite a bit at it and it responded fine; uploaded a couple of 3-4MB files and it didn’t even skip a beat. The inability to edit online is a bit of a downer, but not really unexpected, Microsoft make way too much money off Office to consider damaging their sales.   Still I’m fairly impressed with the overall quality of the service, and the seamless integration into Office.  This really just increases the blurring of the lines between on & off-line.

Other information elsewhere

• Official Microsoft Press Release
• A very extensive review by ReadWriteWeb
• Factsheet of features from Microsoft
• TechCrunch’s announcement