Microsoft announces open beta-testing of Office Live Workspace

24th March 2008

Microsoft Corporation announced the beginning of an open beta-testing a new service Office Live Workspace. The service is an addition to the office package and allows the joint processing files of Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Among the opportunities of the program there is files commenting and their exchange with other users.
The service is compatible with Office XP, 2003 and 2007. Registered users can save files into Live Workspace directly from the application menu, bypassing the browser. Then the files can be accessed from any computer. The files are saved in the so-called working areas, each of which can contain up to 1000 files.
Along with the start of the open beta testing Microsoft also added several new features, asked by the participants of the closed beta testing. These ones include:
special panel, looking at which, you can see the current activity in the work area;
notifications by mail about the changes made to the docs;
direct links to the working area;
downloading several files to the server simultaneously;
more convenient interface for files exchange.
The service is now available in English only, localized versions are going to be launched later this year.