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So since I purchased a legitimate copy of Microsoft Office Home & Student 2007, I stumbled on this Office Live Workspace concept Microsoft currently have in Beta. To be honest, I haven’t heard much about it and thought this would be an opportune time to investigate further. You can read the press release here.
Like most people, I carry around a USB flash drive which has my personal files I take between the office and home, a few pictures etc. It’s the convenience of it all really. Lately I had thoughts of using Windows Home Server just to access my files from wherever I might be, but this looks like the next logical step in my data portability wrangle. I’ve had panic attacks when I can’t find my flash drive. It has my household budgets for the next two months at least on it, the same kind of panic attack when you have to go a day without a cellphone. You know what I mean.
But as I delve deeper into this, it’s part of the phenomenon called Cloud Computing – which has industry leaders like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo on its bandwagon. Basically, it’s a virtualisation of services, most well known being Facebook, Flickr and Chrome.
With Microsoft Office Live Workspace, you have 5GB of personal storage space. That’s slightly larger than your average flash drive size. They tout that you don’t need Office installed on your PC and you can access your files from the poolside (Effects of Chlorine on Laptops?) It’s your virtual file cabinet, create workspaces and store and collaborate on school work or personal files. To share files, all you need is an email address and Workspace ensures that you are all collaborating on the most current document, so you don’t risk jeopardizing your project with out of date files or missed emails.
Office Live Workspace
If using a web browser isn’t your thing, and you have Office installed on your PC, I recommend getting the Live Update so that you can access your Workspace from your native Office applications without having to launch a browser. Installing this update can be a small drama. Last night on my Acer Laptop running Vista Home Premium and over a wireless lan connection, it took me about 30 minutes to get there as Vista requires an additional update before it can install the Live Update for Workspace.
How do I rate Office Live Workspace? I think the concept is fantastic, but overall, I haven’t gone head first into this service yet, but I don’t think it will be long before the other average internet users will catch on to this either. Personally, it will take me a while to get everything on my Workspace that I like, but don’t feel limited. You can put PDF files and images on there too. Sayonara Flash Drive.
But in this day and age of computing, we are not limited to Microsoft Products and as I mentioned earlier, the other major player in the dark skies of Cloud Computing is Google. I would hazard a guess and say that everyone knows Google, has considered having a Gmail address at some stage. But Google offers other services too. They have Blogger, Google Apps, Latitude, Docs, Sites, Calendar and Picasa. Of course, whichever cloud you choose to follow to, there is plenty written comparing Microsoft’s Cloud to the Google Cloud. Maybe I will look at Google over the Easter Weekend when I don’t have much planned.