Office Live Workspace

Simon wrote yesterday about Adobe’s purchase of Buzzword, an online word processor. In an almost simultaneous announcement yesterday, Microsoft announced the launch of its own Office Live Workspace, an online service that will allow Office users to store and access their documents online.

Each user will have 250 MB of space to store documents. The catch? Although you will be able to share the documents with other users, who can read and leave comments on your documents online, only a desktop coy of Office (2003 or 2007) will be able to edit them.

The service isn’t yet available, so it’s hard to say how it will work in practice, but it looks like a promising extension of Office for those of us who need to work from multiple locations and are already using Office programs. If the features on true online services like Google apps or Zoho are just too limited for you, it might be worth signing up for the beta, which is to be rolled out later this year.