Microsoft Office Live Workspace Launches Beta, Could Be Better

Published
by
Josh
on March 5, 2008
in Product Reviews
.

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oslw.jpgIt’s official. Microsoft Office Live Workspace, that was previously invitation only, has launch its public beta for the entire world to feast upon.

“An Online extension of Microsoft Office.”

This is just one more way to share your documents, but if you company is built on spreadsheets, there are a few things unique to Workspace that could help you out just enough to not be very helpful. Oh, and could it be used for SolidWorks Data?

If you use something like Zoho or Google Docs you may already have a lot of your documents online. The approach is a little different with Workspace. The idea with Workspace is to setup, ya know, a workspace, create documents offline and share them online. Here’s some nice things about it.

Upload multiple large documents
One big advantage for Live is the ability to upload multiple large files and more filetypes. In this beta version upload size is limited to 30MB per file. That means you could put a fairly large assembly set on there and share it with some of those crazy people you work with.
Linked with Microsoft Office
Live is directly synced with Microsoft Office on your computer. You edit it offline and save it to Live with a toolbar icon. You can do this with a Zoho plugin, but with Live it’s a little more seamless.
Contact, Lists, Events that link to Outlook
You can also add Notes, a list of Contacts or Events, put them in a workspace and add them to Outlook. Of course you also have to ability to share these also.

So, why isn’t it helpful? Here’s the lame parts:

  • You can’t download multiple documents
  • You can’t view many filetypes beyond Office files
  • You’ll need to use Internet Explorer to allow the ActiveX controls
  • You can’t drag and drop out of Windows Live to open a document

So, it’s the beta version and it’s not everything a “workspace” could be outside the realm of Microsoft Office, but it has its moments.

Using it for SolidWorks Data?
Uploading multiple documents is great, but having to download them one at a time is awful. I imagine SolidWorks (Labs?) could whip up an add-in to use with Workspace, but that probably gets in the way of people using buying other products to do this. Would it even be something you would use?

It’s nice to share things quickly online without having to send emails or FTP files back and forth. There’s nothing I’ve found so far that good for large data sets of parametric CAD data online though. At least nothing in the vein of a simple to use web-app.

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Viewing 3 Comments

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    • v
    Josh,

    I just started messing around with this tool. You are correct about its limitations. Microsoft has another tool in beta right now. Its called Foldershare. This tool is very useful to sync data from mulitple computers. I have it running on my work machine and my home machine. It synchronizes the changes that happen to selected folders on each machine that has the foldershare app running on it. This could be great for having SolidWorks data synchronized across different sites. I don't know how quickly it syncs files, but nonetheless its good to see someone is working in this direction.

    https://www.foldershare.com/
    • ^
    • v
    "It’s nice to share things quickly online without having to send emails or FTP files back and forth. There’s nothing I’ve found so far that good for large data sets of parametric CAD data online though. At least nothing in the vein of a simple to use web-app."

    Do you think people would use such a web app if it existed? How concerned about security would you be? Would you be willing to pay a small amount of money (say $5 per month, for instance) if the web app gave you, say 1 GB of storage space? Would such a web app save your company money vs. FTP account(s)?

    I've often wondered if such a web app would be appealing to the design community, and your opinions would be welcome.

    thanks

    Barry
    • ^
    • v
    Hi Barry, I definitely think it would be appealing.

    Storage price isn't so much an issue any more. Amazon S3 is only $0.15 per GB-month/$0.10 per GB transfer. That's cheap.

    I'm looking at a Firefox add-on called Amazon S3 Organizer that allows multiple uploads and syncing capabilities. The nice thing is that it's browser based. The lame thing is that it's separate from the service and doesn't allow me to share.

    Security could be a concern as well. While you would like to have it encrypted, it's nice to access anywhere online and if user authentication bypasses file encryption it doesn't matter to much anyway.

    The pipes (bandwidth) is the big problem, but with HD content being used more and storage needs increasing, I think large model data will fall into place just fine.

    It's going to be interesting to see how CAD develops on the Web. It's one of the last things to get there. What options do you think there are?
 

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