{"id":1192,"date":"2009-01-29T23:04:36","date_gmt":"2009-01-29T22:04:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/1192-hands-on-with-office-live-workspace-beta.html"},"modified":"2009-01-29T23:04:36","modified_gmt":"2009-01-29T22:04:36","slug":"hands-on-with-office-live-workspace-beta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/1192-hands-on-with-office-live-workspace-beta.html","title":{"rendered":"Hands On with Office Live Workspace beta"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was asked today: how can I share documents with a remote worker? This is a two-person business. There are a zillion and one solutions these days, but all have downsides.<\/p>\n

Set up a server and VPN: fine when it works, but what to do when it fails? Backup? Maintenance and patching?<\/p>\n

Google Docs<\/a>: A great solution, but what if you want to work with real Word and Excel documents? Excel in particular is hard to replace if you use it in earnest (big sheets, many calculations).<\/p>\n

Netdocuments<\/a>: This looks promising, though I haven\u2019t tried it.<\/p>\n

Subversion<\/a>: This is what I use (with TortoiseSVN<\/a>), but it\u2019s terribly techie.<\/p>\n

Live Mesh<\/a>: Brilliant concept; automatic offline copies; just save documents to a shared folder and you\u2019re done. One hesitation is that I\u2019ve known the Mesh client to crash mysteriously. It\u2019s a beta. And how secure are your Mesh documents from prying eyes? <\/p>\n

What about Office Live Workspace<\/a>? This is a form of hosted SharePoint and in theory it\u2019s ideal \u2013 except, perhaps, that you have to keep a local copy of documents just in case the service goes down. You can store \u201cover 1000 documents\u201d online for free. I took a quick look. Signed up. Some sort of Live client needed. Client also needed a Vista update. Vista update installed and wanted a reboot. Live client declared it was already installed and setup closed. Rebooted. Back to Live Workspace. Live Client starts to install again, this time succeeds. Try to save from Word 2007, Live ID password prompt pops up numerous times. Word wants a further add-in. Second reboot. Something like that, anyway; the usual Windows merry-go-round.<\/p>\n

Still, eventually I appear to have all the pieces in place. I type a new document in Word and click the Office button. I now have a new option, Save to Office Live:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Cool. I click Sign in to Office Live Workspace beta. Prompt comes up:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One of my problems is that I refuse to check \u201cSign me in automatically\u201d. I don\u2019t like it; I consider it more secure to sign in and out of services as I need them. There\u2019s also a problem if you have more than one Live ID. Unfortunately some services deliver a poor user experience if you don\u2019t sign in automatically, and I suspect Live Workspace is one of them. Anyway, I sign-in and wait 10-15 seconds. Then I get this dialog:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I hit Save. Mistake: I get this dialog:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

OK, my error was not to select a folder within the workspace. Easy mistake to make though, and the error message could be better. I double-click Documents and retry. I get this progress bar:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Takes a few seconds, and I\u2019m done.<\/p>\n

Once your document is online, it is accessible over the web with an neat in-browser preview:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The toolbar has some handy options including versions and sharing:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I love it; but have two reservations. First, the painful setup, sometimes slow performance, and occasional strange errors, like the fact that Office Live sometimes decides my IE7, fully patched browser is not up to scratch:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

If I recommend this to my contact, what\u2019s the chance that I\u2019ll get a call concerning some odd behaviour or failure with the Live client, or the Office Live add-in, or Internet Explorer, and end up (as so often) troubleshooting Windows instead of getting on with work? <\/p>\n

Second, I\u2019m concerned about availability in a business context. If a customer calls you, and you need to see a document, what if Live Workspace (or Google Docs,  or any online service) is temporarily unavailable? You give that lame excuse, \u201cWe\u2019re having computer problems, can you call back?\u201d; or else keep offline copies \u2013 but if you keep offline copies, getting the workflow right becomes difficult. I notice that Netdocuments has a Local Document Server option which may fix this. SharePoint solves this to some extent with Outlook lists, but I\u2019m not convinced that these work well enough with large document libraries, and I don\u2019t know if Live Workspace offers them.<\/p>\n

That is the beauty of seamless online\/offline solutions like Live Mesh, or indeed Subversion, or some future Google Docs with Gears doing the offline stuff.<\/p>\n

Finally, why is Microsoft offering both Live Mesh and Live Workspace? Different teams I guess; but it makes a confusing offering overall.<\/p>\n

Technorati tags: live workspace<\/a>, microsoft<\/a>, office live<\/a>, google docs<\/a>, netdocuments<\/a>, sharepoint<\/a>, subversion<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was asked today: how can I share documents with a remote worker? This is a two-person business. There are a zillion and one solutions these days, but all have downsides. Set up a server and VPN: fine when it works, but what to do when it fails? Backup? Maintenance and patching? Google Docs: A … Continue reading Hands On with Office Live Workspace beta<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,44,55,97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cloud-computing","category-internet","category-microsoft","category-windows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}