Workspace Buzz

The Office Live Workspace team presented David Austin, a Seattle graduate student at the University of Washington, with his $100,000 grand prize on June 23 as part of the sweepstakes that began March 4, 2008. Participants entered by signing up for a workspace, and earned bonus entries by uploading their first document and by sharing a document or workspace with others.

“Not only do I use Office Live Workspace today to keep my documents safe but as I start my next year of grad school, I’ll be using this service to collaborate on class projects, and beyond that in my daily life as well, to coordinate family trips with my wife and my brother’s family, plan church activities and track my swimming workouts.”

David Austin, Sweepstakes winner

“Whereas getting the most out of Google Apps (particularly the collaborative parts) sort of requires you to go cold turkey on Microsoft Office (if that’s what you have), OLW offers an intermediate step that will likely give some the best of both worlds they were looking for.”

David Berlind, ZDNet

"But given that most people are still more comfortable using the desktop apps they are already familiar with, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Letting people continue writing in Word and auto-syncing to Office Live plays to Microsoft's strengths and makes online document sharing easy. People hardly have to change their behavior at all."

Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch

“Microsoft has been talking up how it plans to make its desktop applications better with Web services. Office Live Workspace actually fulfills that promise. Highly recommended.”

“Office Live Workspace is a tremendous first effort, and one that should satisfy most needs of those who wish to save, access, and collaborate on Office documents online.”

Paul Thurrott, Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows