So, you need an online, collaborative environment to work on documents, keep track of tasks and appointments and keep your team up to speed on the latest happenings in the Penske file. Your group has a mix of Office applications, ranging from XP to 2003 to 2007, and you don’t have the budget for a MOSS 2007 Server – yet!
What do you do? Head on over to http://workspace.office.live.com and sign up for the free public beta of Office Live Workspace:
As pictured, this is in essence a mini-SharePoint style collaboration site allows you to work with and share Office documents among a team of peers that you can invite to the space. Similar to SharePoint, you can create collaboration workspaces by selecting from a list of templates that best suit the type of project you want to facilitate:
Selecting the Project Workspace template yields a site like the following:
Note that the site is pre-populated with a cache of pro-forma documents, ie. a slide deck for the Project Post-Mortem, and a Word doc for the proposal. You also have on the right side an Activity Panel to see who is engaged on the doc, along with running commentary from team members and a link to share the doc with others.
However, the best part of Office Live Workspace is how it seamlessly integrates with your desktop Office apps via the Office add-in. This component adds a menu item to your app UI for publishing your docs directly to your workspace:
For XP and 2003:
and 2007:
If you’ve always wanted to work collaboratively with Office applications, yet don’t have access to a MOSS 2007 server, this is an ideal way to get some exposure and experience the benefits of SharePoint without the cost. What’s even more compelling is how Office Live Workspace is not just for business – as you can see from the array of workspace templates, it’s an ideal solution for school projects, trip planning, and household tasking.
Give it a try – it’s a compelling offering over what the “other guys” are doing… ;-)