With news that Office Live Workspace — or what we might as well label Microsoft Docs — is now available, I gave it a quick try this morning. Via Microsoft Press Release:

People can sign up for free at http://workspace.officelive.com and will be granted immediate access to the service. Microsoft is also unveiling a number of new Office Live Workspace features, such as an activity panel, notifications, direct links and multifile upload.

The three pane window UI with the middle being the document section is familiar:

I like the simplified layout better than Office Word with the new ribbon but there is one big problem in Firefox that Microsoft needs to fix: you can’t type anything in the note section in Firefox.

This requires loading Internet Explorer to be able to type the body of notes. I’m not going to change my browser of choice to use this instead of Google Docs. Yeah, it’s beta and I’m sure they’ll fix this in good time but it would be nice to see Microsoft release (even in beta) a web app which has major functionality like this working in Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer, not only the obvious latter. Silverlight?

Bonus points for allowing to create documents in Office applications offline and save them to the Office Live Workspace with this Office Live Add-in. You can learn more about how to use the Office Live Add-in with the tip that Vista users should install the Office Live Workspace Update for Windows Vista for best performance. Reboot required for that last one.

Curious what others think? (will update)
Michael Arrington isn’t impressed: "It’s a half way approach that still requires the installation of Office and other software on local machines."
Leo Blanco loves the competition: "What I love about all these price wars and cutthroat competition is it pushes companies to enhance consumer experience through low prices or better customer service."
David Chartier at ARS Technica: "Office Live Workspace is a well-rounded tool that removes a lot of the complicated and expensive overhead of collaboration."

Shot across the bow of Google or fart in the wind?
If you don’t own or use Office — and keep in mind that a lot of people, particularly business, do — there isn’t much to see here yet. However, for those who work in and around Office it’s nice to see Microsoft make this available. We have one Office suite for our online business while in our offline business we’re using OpenOffice. Will this make me go out and buy another Office license? Not yet. You?

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