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Office Live Workspace Beta Released Internationally

Microsoft released an international beta of its Office Live Workspace (OLW) suite of productivity tools. The company also quietly launched an Office Live Update last week.

• By David Nagel
• May 23, 2008

The company also quietly launched an Office Live Update last week that takes on performance issues and brings in some additional functionality when working with Office 2007, XP and 2003.

Office Live Workspace is a Web-based suite of office tools designed to complement Microsoft Office and that includes features for online document sharing and collaboration. It was announced originally in October 2007, then went into private beta in December 2007. A worldwide beta launched in March 2008, but it had been limited to English only. The new release is now available in Spanish, French, German and Japanese.

OLW is also a part of Live@edu, Microsoft's portal, communications and collaboration suite for education. The integration of OLW allows users to upload Office files through the service and set permissions for colleagues -- including instructors and students -- to view and collaborate on assignments and other documents. Live@edu has been around since 2005 but only incorporated OLW in the last quarter of 2007.

Roughly coinciding with the international beta launch, Microsoft has also released Office Live Update 1.1 (previously called "Office Live Add-in"), which, according to the company, improves the performance of Office applications when working with OLW; adds new menu options (Office 2007) and toolbars (Office XP and 2003); and includes the Multiple Document Upload Tool for simultaneous upload of multiple documents and drag-and-drop support for file uploads.

Further information about Office Live Update 1.1, including system requirements and a download link, can be found here. Further information about the OLW international beta launch can be found here.