Free Online Collaboration Service Planned

Office Live Workspace, a free service that entered beta testing in Oct. 2007, provides an online space for users to store, edit, and share information, including Office documents and other types of files. The service, which could replace the practice of e-mailing attachments or swapping files on flash memory drives, was announced at the same time as Microsoft Online, the company’s set of hosted server applications for enterprises, and is Microsoft’s most direct response so far to the threat of online productivity applications cutting into Office sales.

(For more coverage of Microsoft Online, see “Hosted Messaging and Collaboration Services from Microsoft“.)

Protecting Office

Microsoft is in the midst of a major companywide effort to add online services to nearly all of its business lines—an initiative that the company has deemed “software plus services.”

One impetus for this change is the threat of competition from Web-based productivity offerings that compete with Microsoft Office, such as Google Docs (which includes an online word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application) and Adobe’s Buzzword (an online word processor that Adobe acquired in Oct. 2007). While none of these products generates the revenue or has the customer base of Office, they are garnering considerable media attention and attracting interest from some users because of certain inherent advantages in online applications, such as ease of sharing and collaboration, accessibility from different types of devices from any location, and lower risk of data loss.