March 2008 — News

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Microsoft Expands Office Live Workspace Beta Worldwide

by Dave Nagel

After nearly three months of private beta testing involving about 100,000 users, Microsoft Office Live Workspace (OLW) is being rolled out worldwide as a full public beta. Previously, participants had to be qualified by Microsoft for the beta; now, as of today, it's open to all comers who wish to create workspaces. Coinciding with the public beta, Microsoft has also revved OLW with new features and enhancements and has kicked off a sweepstakes to build awareness for the service.

Office Live Workspace is a Web-based suite of office tools that's designed to complement Microsoft Office and that includes features for online document sharing and collaboration. It was announced originally in October, then went into private beta in December. It's also a part of Live@edu, Microsoft's portal, communications, and collaboration suite for education. The integration of OLW allows users to upload Office files through the service and set permissions for colleagues--including instructors and students--to view and collaborate on assignments and other documents. Live@edu has been around since 2005 but only incorporated OLW in the last quarter of 2007.

Full Beta Rollout, Enhanced Features
The full public beta of Office Live Workspace went live March 4 at 12:01 a.m. EST. At present, it's available only in English, although Microsoft told us that it plans to support additional languages in 2008. Said Guy Gilbert, group product manager for Microsoft's Office Live Workspace, "We're still working on that timeline, but we will introduce other languages in other markets later this year."

The beta previously required users to pre-register for the service and for beta participants to be qualified by Microsoft. Gilbert said that "hundreds of thousands" of people have already pre-registered. Now the pre-registration and qualification restrictions have been lifted.

To coincide with the public launch, Microsoft has also incorporated several feature enhancements suggested by beta participants, including IT staffers at several colleges and universities. These enhancements affect users of both OLW and Live@edu.

In a phone interview, Bruce Gabrielle, product marketing manager for Microsoft's Live@edu, said, "As the program has evolved, we continue to include more applications from Microsoft product groups into Live@edu. In addition to adding a lot of applications to the suite, the applications themselves--as we move from a software-only company to a software plus Web services company--those products also evolve very, very rapidly. And so Office Live Workspace ... has already gone through a round of customer feedback and improvements, and so we have a lot of enhancements to the Live@edu suite because of the improvements to Office Live Workspace."

These improvements, for now, include: