Microsoft Office Goes Kinda-Sorta Online

I keep saying it's inevitable that Microsoft will release some sort of online office suite. That day isn't here, but tonight, the company announced Office Live Workspace--an "online companion" to Office that sure sounds like a measured response to the threat to the Office hegemony posed by Google Docs and other Web-based productivity tools.

The news comes as part of a bunch of service-related announcements made by Microsoft today, including the fact that it'll offer a hosted version of its Exchange server (aimed at companies with at least 5,000 Outlook users) and is changing the name of the e-commerce services currently known as Office Live to Office Live Small Business. (Which isn't to be confused with Office 2007 Small Business, with which it doesn't have much in common.)

So what's Office Live Workspace, which isn't yet live, but accepting sign-ups here? (Good luck--I got an error message when I tried to register with one Hotmail e-mail address.) Microsoft's explanation of the service is pretty sketchy, but it'll be free, will let you store 1000+ documents online and access them from within Office (2007 and earlier versions), will have some sort of editing and collaboration features, and will offer synchronization with Outlook. In other words, it'll be something more than a Web hard drive such as Xdrive, but something short of a standalone Web suite such as those offered by Google and Zoho.

Some aspects of Office Live Workspace seem overdue (shouldn't Office have let anyone easily save documents to the Web, oh, about a decade ago?). Some are potentially intriguing, like the collaborative features. And it remains to be seen whether it'll be a coherent experience in a world where so many Microsoft competitors are making the Net the center of the productivity experience, rather than an adjunct to desktop software.

But considering that no current Web suite gives power users all the tools they'd need to even flirt with dumping Office, Office Live Workspace isn't destined to be a half-hearted response to the online suite trend. Done right, it could make plenty of sense for people who live much of their life online--and who doesn't?--but who have no desire to leave Office behind altogether. (I still think it's a given that Microsoft will have no choice but to take Office online in a more decisive fashion, though--in fact, I'd be amazed if there were no plans afoot to do that reasonably soon.)

This blog post by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley has some additional details, including a statement from a Microsoft exec that Office Live Workspace will also work as a complement to other suites such as Star Office and its OpenOffice.org open-source variant. It's startling to hear anyone from Redmond pitching a new product as being useful to folks who run other suites, but I don't think Office Live Workspace will usher in a new era of Microsoft as a developer of truly open, standard Web services--I tried to sign up using Firefox on a Mac and got a message telling me I needed to be using Internet Explorer and Windows.

(It'll be a great day when Microsoft stops developing stuff that requires IE--and by that I mean it'll be a great day for both people who use Microsoft services and for Microsoft itself, if it wants to be taken seriously in the Web era. And it surely can't be that big a challenge, given that most every other provider of Web services on the planet has managed to do it.)

That's most of what we know about Office Live Workspace, which Microsoft hasn't even released screenshots of. More details as we get 'em.