Microsoft Office Live Workspace and Macs

Microsoft opened up the beta program for their free Office Live Workspace web service recently. I was a bit confused at first why Microsoft would offer this service since they already have a Live Skydrive web service that provides 1GB of online storage. As it turns out Workspace Live Office is much more than just a simple online storage service. It lets you share and view Microsoft Office documents (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) in the browser without requiring any client-side application. I've found it quite handy to view a stored Office document without downloading it first.

The good news is that it seems to work fine on a Mac running Leopard and Firefox 2.0. There are a couple of gotchas though. First, it only provides 250MB of storage. But, let's not forget that it wasn't long ago that the .Mac service only provided 100MB (for a fee). Unlike Microsoft's own Skydrive or Google Docs, everything except the login is transmitted in clear text. Finally, this Microsoft Office Live Workspace doesn't support Microsoft Office 2007 documents (cough cough). I assume this will be fixed at some point (hopefully soon).

The service can still be considered an early beta release. So, some of these issues will probably go away soon. In the meantime, it is still worthwhile for Mac users to take it for a spin.