Microsoft Office Live Workspace Public Beta Version Rolled Out

On Monday, Microsoft released the public beta version of the Office Live Workshop and additionally incorporated a slew of features to the service that users can club with the desktop version of Office. The Live Workspace was announced originally in October, then went into private beta in December.

It is important to note that Office Live Workshop is not an online version of Office, but a plethora of services through which users will be able to share and store documents on the internet. In anticipation of scaling up the service to its 500 million Office users, the software company has also deleted its wait list requirement. 13 universities are apparently participating in the beta.

According to Microsoft honcho Steve Ballmer, all of Microsoft’s “shrink-wrapped software” would in the long run have an online services component as part of the company’s software plus services initiative.

Five new features have been added to Microsoft’s Live Workspace, which includes the following:

Activity Panel: It shows all the activities in a workspace

Notifications: It offers notice of changes made to a workspace or document

Direct Links: It allows users to set a browser bookmark for a particular workspace

Direct links: People can now bookmark their workspace or a workspace item via a unique URL in a browser window

Multi-file upload: Drag-and-drop multi-file upload capability

The English-only public beta of Live Workspace is now available across the globe and Microsoft is in works of introducing other languages and end the service’s beta cycle later this year. The English-version is being offered free of charge and people can sign up for free at http://workspace.officelive.com.

Microsoft execs are hopeful of adding more productivity tools to the Office Live Workspace soon.