MS Live Workspace

A few of us at Macadamian have been experimenting with the Microsoft Live Workspace thingy... Sort of Google Docs for MS Office users.

This is still very beta and several key collaboration features existing in Google Docs are missing. To name a few:

1. Folders: this was the first annoyance, when you collaborate on a project you want to keep things clean otherwise it gets... messy... one need a way to organize files.
   
2. Email Collaborators: This is a low hanging fruit, when you collaborate you need to email your collaborator, why isn't this there yet? Beats me.
   
3. Notifications seems flaky: I just started to get them (took time to work) but they have no content, just a link, only partially useful.
   
4. History: Well, I have yet to find a way to see the "diff" between the versions. I do not think it's there although I am sure I read somewhere something about this.
   

All in all this is an acceptable stab at it from MS, in my opinion mainly for two reasons:

• It promotes document sharing in a rather nice and working (most of the time) way. Can we be done with sending each others documents as attachments once for all?
  
• It leverages Words and other Office tools - although most of the time overrated and overpowered for most uses - they have been adopted in organizations, keeping them around while working in the cloud makes it comfortable for most of us and it does not create the same resistance to change effect than Google Docs does.
  

This being said, the current Live Workspace offering is far from the power that we need for efficient distributed collaboration. Google seems to have a serious lead there but people wants to use Word... What can you do?

I still thinks this is far superior - event with the occasional glitches - than the staus quo of keeping sending each others documents as attachments.

With this at least you will stop asking yourself: "Am I looking at the latest version?"