Office Live Team

I signed up for the live workspace beta and the very first thing that I noticed is the calendar and contact synchronization capabilities. Within OfficeLive.com this feature isn’t even close to the same.Office Live accounts are designed to leverage the original implementation of Hotmail.com which does not allow for calendar synchronization. Another interesting feature in Live Workspace is the desktop sharing tool (see below) which is a mini live meeting for online collaboration. Once your Live Workspace account is setup you will see a link to “Install office Add-In” which will add the sharing tool to your Microsoft Office applications.

Initial impressions of the sharing tool are pretty good but it is still a little buggy. I experienced some application freezes and occasional crashing of the sharing tool itself but nothing that required a reboot. Additionally, Microsoft is very open about its deficiencies and information regarding many of the issues and bugs are available within the release notes and FAQ. Live Workspaces document features are similar to Office Live and it will be interesting to see how they integrate or differentiate the two platforms moving forward. One thing I noticed about Office Live is that it is essentially Hotmail (or Live mail) on the back end and you cannot sync your calendar as you might expect. The lack of calendar sync for Office Live, even in the Premium Edition, is a bummer. I hope they merge the two platforms to eliminate this issue moving forward. The beta is currently free and it can be an excellent tool for an individual consultant or small company that wants an easy way to collaborate without deploying a SharePoint server.

However, I must warn you not to become too dependent upon this application in the Beta phase. I experienced some frustration with Office Live when it moved from Beta to full release and there is no guarantee that your data will be available or backed up. So if you do plan on using it make sure its not the only copy of documents or contacts until the final version.

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