Office Live

Live, Not Survive: Microsoft Will Take Online Office on the Best Road

According to Anita Hamilton’s “Late to the Game: Microsoft Office Online” on TIME, the rivalry of paperless office technologies like word processor, spreadsheets or presentations, etc. has been not the old style ”Microsoft Office or IBM Lotus” for more and more companies. Giving Google Docs or Zoho a try is the recent popular choice for us.

Although Microsoft Office is still the dominant in the area of business applications for office, it can’t ignore what’s going in the current markets. It has been quite a few months after I introduced Microsoft’s project “Office Live Workspace Beta” (refer to Live Workshop Rivalry: Build Your Presentation Mind On the Road), and I cited that we really need better Web capabilities on the coming office suite (refer to On The Road: Microsoft Office Has To Bet Its Future On The Web). But why Microsoft decide not catch up the way until 2010?

Microsoft Wants to Make the Best Web Office

I have to thank for all the efforts on those gorgeous ribbons and SmartArts in Office 2007, which really help me a lot on presentations. However, online compatibility is the biggest weakness in the Internet times. The coming Office 14 would be really late for the online office market, but I guess Microsoft won’t make that launch another miss. Heard from Workspace Team Blog, the Sliverlight technology has been added into the new Office Live Workspace. Based on the great rich media technologies from Microsoft Silverlight, maybe the expected Office 14 could move all rich features in Office 2007 to the Web. Isn’t that the best idea to conquer the online land for Microsoft? We’re waiting.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Open Office or Not: Web Friendly Microsoft Office 14 Takes the Stage

Microsoft has announced that the Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 would be out next spring, but I can’t find more surprises like the ribbon in first 2007. When I was interested in the recent frenzy of gorgeous Open Office 3.0, Microsoft PDC 2008 (Professional Developers Conference) showed us something new: Office 14 for Web.

I can’t tell this new Web friendly Office will catch the future or not. We see, it’s really cool, with the immigration to online office trends like Google Docs. Definitely Microsoft wants to capture the newly Web market as Google does, and it’s not a bad idea to start up testing the future software as service. Does this work? We’ll see how Google makes and wait for the answer.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Your Office at Work: Fresh Resource Center inside Microsoft Office

Not only you, I’m engaged to Microsoft’s Office at Work, which is far more than some hints and tips for those office applications. Because the contents there are really helpful in our daily office life. We can not miss those great ideas to stuff:

• A popular article from Office Hours on ninja tricks you can perform
• An introduction to readability stats
• A review of phishing and other email warnings
• Updated Excel tips (the most popular program folks are looking for hints on this page)
• Most e-mailed templates (based on email this link data)
• A link to our own comic, Office OFFline
• Plus keeping last month’s most popular article, PowerPoint without bullets

The best part here is, you’ll find the resources you want to see on different prospects, such as Office at Home, Office at School, Office at a Small Business.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Live Workshop Rivalry: Build Your Presentation Mind On the Road

Not a great presentation can be just made by an impulse on an office desktop. You probably catch an excellent idea to strengthen your presentation on the road home or far far away from your workspace. Turn your car back in the highway long queue? Internet is born to help people build the virtual bridge anywhere anytime. Microsoft Office Live revealed its Workspace Beta months ago to response the challengers, especially Google Docs.

As a part of Office Live, the Workspace is just an online companion to Microsoft Office or a free SharePoint Lite for everyone. Besides its only 250 MB storage, the Workspace doesn’t offer an online presentation editor within a Web page like Google Docs but launching your installed Microsoft PowerPoint to do the editing. I really don’t prefer this idea. Actually the only flashpoint of the Workspace to me, is the official support of PowerPoint 2007 documents, while Google Docs cannot make that. Despite ThinkFree Office also supports Office 2007 X files, its Java Applet application seems unfriendly to explore.

Referring to the article Five Reasons Google Docs Beats Office Live Workspace (believe me, it’s not Google’s promotion essay), we can know that, Google really helps, while Microsoft just takes the popular Web 2.0 to promote Microsoft Office:

1. Office Live Workspace Does Not Allow You To Create And Edit Documents Within A Web Page. Google Docs Does;
2. Microsoft Office Live Workspace Has A 250 MB 1,000 Average Office Documents Limitation. Google Docs Does Not;
3. Microsoft’s Office Live WorkSpace Is VaporWare. Google Docs is Real;
4. You’re Better Off Trusting Google Than Microsoft When It Comes To Web 2.0 Security Issues;
5. Office Live Workspace Is Optimized For Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint Data. Google Is Optimized For Web 2.0.

I have to state that I use and like Microsoft Office as well as Google Docs. Google Docs also has drawback, such as its online async due to Internet delay. And Live Workspace is not a white elephant because of its official development support. Everyone can benefit from the rivalry to keep your continuous inspiration efficiently over Internet.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran