Office Live

Microsoft is going to provide competition to Google docs and spreadsheet through there new service Micrsoft Office Live workspace. A major difference is that it will not be a web based application but sort of an extension to there Desktop based Office Suite.

This will enable users to to store and share documents from Microsoft Office Online , the users will also be able to access it from anywhere. It will give users around 250 Mb of storage to store there office documents. The users can then invite other users to have a look at there word , excel , powerpoint documents and comment on them. Since it is not a web based application , users who wish to edit the document will have to open it through there desktop based office application , but they can save it directly to the website from the office suite. Apart from Office 2003 and office 2007 , it will also support documents created using OpenOffice , Staroffice and Office XP .

Currently the service is not live . If you are interested , you can signup for the beta. If you are lucky , you will get a chance to try this out sometime later in the year . The service will be free initially but will have a limitation of 1000 files.