Take your Office with you

GillLeFevre — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:38:43 GMT

Today, an update on Office Live Workspace from Tim Kimber, UK Office Live Product Manager. (Plus, if you'd rather watch than read, check out these handy Getting Started videos.)

How Office Live Workspaces can take the hassle out of getting stuff done

Working with different people in different places can be fun, but it can also present challenges. Take this example: you’re working on a project with colleagues in other organisations. How do you share your important documents? Chances are it’s via email. Each one in the team makes their amendments or adds comments, and pings it on for everyone else to look at. And you’re the one who has to co-ordinate the changes, making sure nothing gets forgotten.

You save the files to your flash drive or email them to yourself so you can work on them out of the office. Stop right there! There is a better way to save your sanity and size of your inbox, and it’s called Office Live Workspace.

Creating a workspace is really quick and simple, and within minutes you have a central location for all your files, including Office, Excel and PowerPoint files. It’s easy to put all the key documents into the workspace, and you can then invite your colleagues to share. They don’t need their own account to work on the documents in the shared workspace. But you’re in control. As the owner of the workspace, you decide who can edit and who can read your files.

So now you’re waiting for some important updates to your shared project, and you have to leave the office. You get home and decide to see whether they’ve been done. By simply using your password-protected login, you can get into the workspace from any location as long as you have internet access. Is it ready yet? No need to phone and find out – just check the Activity pane and you’ll immediately see when the new version is there.

The next day you discover that some content was deleted and now it’s needed again. Not a problem. Office Live Workspace saves the old versions with the new one if it’s more than 12 hours since you edited something, or someone else makes changes. The content is easily restored. Phew!

If you need to look at a specific document frequently, you can bookmark it just as you do with web pages for fast access. And you can email those bookmarks to your team members so they get the benefit as well.

Working on more than one project at once with different groups is easy. Set up a workspace for each one, so you can really keep tabs on what’s going on across your whole workload. With 500Mb of space (which is around 1,000+ files) available, you won’t have to clog up your email with large presentations or spreadsheets ever again!

Isn’t this the way to go? Best of all, it’s absolutely free and you don’t need to download anything to use it. Sign up today and you could be using your Office Live Workspace in a few minutes!

Surviving work travel with Microsoft Office

GillLeFevre — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 14:02:08 GMT

I've just spent a week out of the office on a work conference. It's the first time I've been away from my daughter for more than a night since she was born and, as chief child-minder in our household, an enormous amount of advance planning was required to make sure everything ran smoothly while I was away.

The contrast with the effort (not) required to keep my "day job" under control was vast, so I thought I'd share a few thoughts about the technology I used to survive.

1. RPC over HTTP (or failing that Outlook Web Access)

Basically this string of acronyms means I can get email through any internet connection. It's a godsend. No need to dial into a company server, just connect and go. And the number of places world-wide where you can get wireless internet access is incredible (even our local pub is offering Wifi!) so no more excuses for not sending that overdue email...

2. Groove

Groove synchronises files without you having to think. It's a great way to work on documents with other people and not have to email countless versions back and forth (and always end up with someone working on an out-of-date copy). For me on this trip it meant that I had the latest copy of our newsletter with me when we ran into a last-minute problem.I just opened up the Groove Workspace, fixed the problem and saved the document. Then when my colleague got into the office the next morning, it was all ready to go.

If you haven't discovered Groove yet, download a free trial.

3. Office Communicator

"Presence" is a wonderful thing. It's the little icon in Office Communicator that tells you when people are online (or busy, or in a call...). It means that although I'm in another time zone, my colleagues in the UK can easily see when I'm up and online. Then they can fire off a quick question (or just say hello) and get a quick answer, without having to clog up my inbox. Of course, it also means I can see which of my colleagues are having just as much trouble with jetlag as me...

And I haven't even touched on "Out of Office"...

Office At Work : Groove

Take your Office with you

How Office Live Workspaces can take the hassle out of getting stuff done

Surviving work travel with Microsoft Office