Office Live Workspace is an online service for Microsoft Office users that provides online storage and sharing of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and PDF files. Initially, users have 500M of storage space.

So far, only a limited set of US residents who pre-registered for the beta program have access to the service. Office Live Workspace will be available to international users early in 2008, with additional language support coming later in the year.

In some respects, Office Live Workspace resembles SharePoint in that it can be used as a shared repository instead of emailing copies of files to collaborators, which almost inevitably leads to revision control issues.

"We're hopeful that Office Live Workspace helps solve these challenges by providing a place online to keep a single version of a document that everyone can work on – so you’ll always know if you’re working on the latest draft," said irk Gregersen, Office director of consumer and small business product management at Microsoft.

And like SharePoint, Office Live Workspace is integrated with Office (currently XP, 2003 and 2007), making it easy to save and load documents without resorting to a web browser or other application.

"We're hopeful that focusing on solving this 'last mile' problem – providing an on-ramp from Office on the desktop to the web and vice-versa – will make things a lot easier for people in their everyday work and personal lives," said Gregersen.

However, some features - including access to documents, commenting and notes - are available via browser and do not require Office for access.

Security features include the ability to restrict access to a particular list of users, and the service includes virus protection from Forefront Security for SharePoint.

Find out more about Office Live Workspace or sign up for the beta at www.officelive.com.

Office Live Workspace can be seen as Microsoft's attempt to match the convenience of online services such as Google Docs that provide similar collaboration and remote access to documents while staying with the company's traditional desktop software model.

Given the enthusiasm exhibited by a growing number of managers for web-delivered applications, it is possible that Office Live Workspace delivers too little. On the other hand, users wedded to Office's features - especially those in small businesses - are likely to find it a convenient and useful extension to the suite.