Over one million users sign up for Office Live Workspace

Or how about if there was a way to make the live office a directory within skydrive.

Any clue on how many use it regularly?

Very cool. Interoperability, features, and a growing base in beta. Throw in some international support and you've got a good start. I'd like to see where Microsoft goes with this.

Mary Jo's thoughts: >>Originally, Microsoft thought many users, especially students, would use the service to gain remote access to their Office documents. Instead, users are tending to use Office Live Workspace more for collaborative/team access to a single document. (Microsoft officials continue to cite this usage pattern in explaining why the company hasn’t released a Webified version of Office. Do users really want to create large text files, spreadsheets and presentations “on the Web” as opposed to on their PCs? Microsoft says no — and I feel the same. As I’ve said before, I think users are choosing Google Docs more because they feel Office is overpriced than because they want to create documents in the cloud.)<< http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1564

I signed up too, but don't use it too much now. That said, I had also created a couple of documents and spreadsheets in Google Docs a year or so ago and haven't looked at it since.

"Is it my old age or what?" Office Live Workspace is a complementary collaboration add-on service to the standard Office software suite. It's essentially a customized, hosted Sharepoint service.

@Doc: "I'm geting a little confused since there is Live Mesh, Windows Live with Skydrive and now this, none of which seems to be related or integrated but have some common attributes." Um.... Ok let me point out the differences: Windows Live SkyDrive is just online storage. It's for backing up files to "the cloud". You can make files accessible to other people using the service too. Live Mesh is a workspace synchronization service that works "in the cloud" (I hate that term). Files are replicated back and forth between devices automatically thereby eliminating the need to carry around a flash drive or CD's. For now, it's just Windows PC based, but it will include support for other types of computing devices in the future. It is considered a technology demo, so I would expect that what you see now won't be what the final product will be. The functionality will likely be incorporated in some other product. SharePoint is a technology that enables people to build intranet portal sites, team collaboration websites and document workspaces, to name a few. It is essentially a CMS (content management system). That's a fancy word for "a backend website program that lets you build your own website easily, without delving into HTML". It's designed for increasing productivity and integrates with Microsoft Office on the desktop. It's not designed for making glamourous websites with fancy graphics, but it gets the job done, cleanly and efficiently. It's an amazing tool in the workplace if you use Office regularly. It is considered part of the Office family of products too. One of the key features is the ability to create sites to track BI (that's Business Intelligence - more marketspeak). For instance, if your sales team created a team site for call-tracking in a phone center (essentially a CRM web app, which Microsoft already provides templates for), a CS manager could track the number of calls on their own separate BI SharePoint site and also see the # of successful resolutions, all presented in a pie chart on their page, which could then be exported to an Excel spreadsheet. It's very extensible. See this website for a demo: http://office.microsoft.com/assistance/asstvid.aspx?assetid=XT1006267510... There are two main versions of SharePoint: Windows SharePoint Services, which offers an easy way to create BI websites and Office document workspaces. It's free, and is installable on Windows Server 2003 or higher. It requires IIS, of course. ....and Office SharePoint Server, which has even more BI options and Office integration. It also offers more programmability and features overall. It costs money, and there are few different sub-versions depending on whether or not you want clustering support for high-availability. Office Live Workspace is just a customized, hosted version of a SharePoint workspace. Microsoft has always allowed developers to create custom SharePoint web applications and site templates, but now they are competing in that market with their own. I would say this is at least their opportunity to inspire developers and hosting service providers to demonstrate what is possible with SharePoint - including the ability to create hosted services of SharePoint sites for service providers to, um, provide.