News
Office Live Workspace Beta Released Internationally
Microsoft released an international beta of its Office Live Workspace (OLW) suite of productivity tools. The company also quietly launched an Office Live Update last week.
- By David Nagel
- May 23, 2008
Microsoft this week released an international beta of its
Office
Live Workspace (OLW) suite of productivity tools.
The company also quietly launched an Office Live Update last week that takes
on performance issues and brings in some additional functionality when working
with Office 2007, XP and 2003.
Office Live Workspace is a Web-based suite of office tools designed to complement
Microsoft Office and that includes features for online document sharing and
collaboration. It was announced
originally in October 2007, then went into private
beta in December 2007. A worldwide
beta launched in March 2008, but it had been limited to English only. The
new release is now available in Spanish, French, German and Japanese.
OLW is also a part of [email protected],
Microsoft's portal, communications and collaboration suite for education. The
integration of OLW allows users to upload Office files through the service and
set permissions for colleagues -- including instructors and students -- to view
and collaborate on assignments and other documents. [email protected] has been around
since 2005 but only incorporated OLW in the last quarter of 2007.
Roughly coinciding with the international beta launch, Microsoft has also released
Office Live Update 1.1 (previously called "Office Live Add-in"), which,
according to the company, improves the performance of Office applications when
working with OLW; adds new menu options (Office 2007) and toolbars (Office XP
and 2003); and includes the Multiple Document Upload Tool for simultaneous upload
of multiple documents and drag-and-drop support for file uploads.
Further information about Office Live Update 1.1, including system requirements
and a download link, can be found here.
Further information about the OLW international beta launch can be found here.
About the Author
Dave Nagel is the executive editor for 1105 Media's educational technology online publications and electronic newsletters.