It is considered as office product extension, over the web. Eric Gilmore, Senior Product Manager, Office live team Microsoft Corporation, said, “Collaborative sharing of workspace over the web is becoming important, with more users’ need to share and view documents sitting anywhere, anytime.”

“Live Workspaces provides the best of desktop and  web experience to all office users, whether a small business or a student, and our intention is to scale Office Live to all 500M Office users over time,” adds Sanjay Manchanda, Director, Microsoft Business Division.

The office Live workspace is closely integrated with Office system applications such as Outlook, Excel and Access, and presents as great tool for any Office user whether at work, home, or at school. The highlight of live workspace is that it does not require Microsoft (MS) office applications installed on the computer. 

With shared view of The MS office desktop component, users can share and view office documents at the same time. Users can have control over their documents in terms of who edits, makes comments etc, and then update the same document back to their Office Live Workspace. Features like activity panel shows all activities in the workspace. Notifications lets users take notice of changes, direct links, allows bookmarks to a particular workspace, drag and drop, and multi-file upload capability.

With regard to security, live workspace is available only to existing Windows live users and is protected with in-built virus protection for documents from Microsoft Forefront Security for SharePoint.

The live workspace service is available in English, and MS plans to add additional languages in future.