You Need Your Space
The panacea to such logistical challenges is a new online tool called Office Live Workspaces. Just log on to http://officelive.com, sign up and you are good to go! So, what is this workspace? A workspace is an online location where you can store, access and share documents and files. You can use it to post information related to your school, work or personal projects. Moreover, you can share this information by inviting others to your workspace by just sending an invitation to their e-mail. A workspace can be accessed from any computer with an Internet connection and a Web browser. And it's absolutely free of cost!
Office Live Workspace has several templates that are useful for different activities -- a Class workspace for students, a Job search workspace for a job seeker, a Project workspace for group collaboration and an Event workspace for event planning and logistics. The templates provided in each workspace give you a head start in your projects. For instance, the Essay workspace provides you with a ready-made template to write an essay or a report. Similarly, the Project workspace gives you a template for proposal presentations. Additionally, the calendar, event lists, contact lists and notes offer a simple and easy to use reference for all your contacts and important dates.
You Got The Mail?
Let me explain Office Live Workspaces with an example. Akanksha is a student who works on multiple class assignments at any given point, most of which require group participation. This is what she does currently. She works on an assignment first, e-mails it to her teammate or classmate to edit or add their piece, then it will be emailed to the next student and so on. The file gets progressively heavier, as pictures and data get added, and it becomes increasingly difficult and time consuming to attach an e-mail -- so complaints from group members about not receiving the mail or not being able to open attachments are common.
Now, all of this hassle is eliminated with Office live Workspace. She can simply log into Office Live Workspace, create a Group Workspace into which she uploads her Excel, Word or PowerPoint file. She then shares the workspace with the group members and gives them editing rights.
Now, Akanksha and her classmates can view the document simultaneously, while on different computers using the 'Shared View' feature and can so discuss documents and make real-time changes even as her classmates are in different locations. Once she saves the document back to the workspace, her classmates can immediately see the changes made. It's just like working together in one room! Not only this, the team can use the 'version history' feature to access older versions of the document. The 'Activity Panel' feature gives a quick snapshot of who has edited the document. Further, group members receive an e-mail notifying them of any changes made to the document or the workspace by any other member. All of this can be done from anywhere -- from home, school or from a cybercafé!
The Wedding Planner
Manoj and Raksha Chawla are wedding planners based at New Delhi. These enthusiastic and technology-savvy entrepreneurs were struggling with constant delays in communicating and exchanging documents with clients and vendors. They wished they could devise a way to get approvals and close things in least possible time to manage multiple events simultaneously. To make it worse, their hectic travel schedules never gave them 'anytime, anywhere access' to information and documents -- leading to delays in projects and customer discontent. That is when a client (in the US) introduced them Office Live Workspace -- a new online service launched by Microsoft recently.
Now instead of exchanging five versions of the documents with the client over e-mails, they simply save documents on the Workspace and share with vendors and clients for instant feedback and comments. In their words, life has become simpler!
So, no more carrying assignments on UBS sticks, no more heavy e-mails, no more confusions about which document version was the final and where it was stored and no more irate team members! This is a single central location where you can keep your important documents and contact lists, mark important dates and share your work with others.
That said, there are a few areas that Microsoft can address to enable students and consumers embrace Office Live Workspace quickly. For instance, it can increase the space limit (500 mb currently), given the huge files and reports students work on. Another observation is that Office Live Workspace works best on a broadband connection (dial-up is not recommended) for optimal performance and speed.
Today hundreds of thousands of people have registered for Office Live Workspace and a number of US universities are using it to collaborate online and make the lives of their students and faculty simpler. Further, Office Live Workspace is also making it easier for small and medium business owners to use information technology tools for higher business impact by making collaboration easier and faster. For instance, in India, Microsoft is already seeing adoption from small business owners like wedding planners like Raksha Chawla and a Bengaluru-based software company with offices in London, Boston and Dubai which is extensively using the SharedView feature to collaborate across global teams and sees a significant increase in the productivity of his employees. Amongst educational institutions, Mallya Aditi International School in Bengaluru is looking to incorporate Office Live Workspace in the school curriculum from the next academic year.
Finally, there is one-stop location to access documents from anywhere, stay connected from different locations and share information with others in a convenient and easy manner and that too at no extra cost! So just log onto www.officelive.com and check it out for yourself!
By -- Sanjay Manchanda, director, Microsoft business division, Microsoft India
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Things from Microsoft are most of the time cool!
