Microsoft Office Live Workspace beta is an easy-to-use Web-based service that helps you exchange business or personal information with the people you select. Use Office Live Workspace to collaborate on documents, notes, spreadsheets, presentations, and lists — any information that is important to your business, friends, or family. The people whom you invite to share your workspace and documents can review, update, and comment on your files from any computer that has an Internet connection.

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• What can you share?

• How do you sign up to share?

• Sharing roles

• Manage your shared workspace and documents

What can you share?

Office Live Workspace offers extensive opportunities for sharing in both your business and personal life. Use Office Live Workspace to share:

• Workspaces   Workspaces can contain collections of documents that have a common theme. You can create a workspace that contains promotional materials that your sales team can access from any computer with an Internet connection. Or you can create a workspace that contains a trip itinerary, packing lists, and other documents that can help you and your friends or family plan for an upcoming vacation.
• Notes   Use notes to create Web documents using helpful formatting tools. Capture critical meeting decisions, class notes, or issues that you need to keep top-of-mind. You can then share your notes with the people you choose so that they can benefit from your note-taking diligence.
• Lists   Lists are Web documents that have a familiar row and column format. Use a list to record the contact information for potential customers you meet during a trade show. Share your list with your team back at the office so that they can send promotional materials to the contact while the trade show memories are still fresh.
• Microsoft Office documents   You can open Microsoft Office Excel worksheets, Word documents, and PowerPoint presentations right from your workspace. Use Office Excel to create a household budget, and then share it with your family or roommates. Create your team's presentation using Office PowerPoint, and share it with others to get their feedback. Write up the notes from your science experiment using Office Word, and invite your lab partner to enter the latest observations in the document.

You can share an entire workspace and all of its contents with the people you choose. If you want to share only a single document in a workspace, such as a note or list, you must first move the document to the Documents workspace before you share it. Just drag the document that you want to share to the Documents workspace under My Workspaces on the left navigation bar.

 Note   You cannot share folders in Office Live Workspace.

You can send a sharing invitation using an e-mail message sent right from the workspace or document that you want to share with others. For more information about sending a sharing invitation, see Invite others to work with you on a shared workspace or document.

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How do you sign up to share?

With Office Live Workspace, you can easily share information with anyone who has an e-mail address by using the following sign-in methods:

• Use an e-mail address and password   Use a valid e-mail address and password to sign in to Office Live Workspace. You can use an e-mail address that you use for other Microsoft services, such as MSN Hotmail or MSN Messenger, or you can use any existing e-mail address that you own. If the people you invite do not have an Office Live Workspace account, Office Live Workspace makes it easy for them to sign up. For more information, see Sign up for Office Live Workspace.
• Preview first, sign in later   If you send sharing invitations to people who are unfamiliar with Office Live Workspace, they may be hesitant to sign up to work with you. To introduce the sharing experience to others, in your sharing invitation, you can allow them to preview a read-only version of your shared workspace or document without signing in to Office Live Workspace. After previewing, if they want to start working with you, they can click the Sign up button on the top left corner of the preview page to set up an account and gain full sharing access. For more information, see Invite others to preview a shared workspace or document.

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Sharing roles

You can invite up to 100 people to share a workspace or document. When you send a sharing invitation, you can define the sharing role of the person you invite. In your invitation, you control whether a user can revise and comment on a workspace and its contents, or just review and comment. Office Live Workspace provides three sharing roles:

• Owner   As the Owner, you initiate a sharing session on a workspace or document that you have created. You have full access to your workspace or document, and you can decide at any time to end a sharing session with the people who you have invited to share.
• Editor   Owners invite Editors to have read/write access on a shared workspace or document. Editors can make changes or add comments to the Owner's content, delete documents, and review all changes and comments from everyone who has sharing privileges.
• Viewer   Owners invite Viewers to have read-only access to a workspace or document. Viewers can see all workspace content, including comments and revisions made by others who have sharing access. Viewers can add their own comments, but they cannot make any changes to the text.

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Manage your shared workspaces and documents

Owners

As an Owner, you can see at a glance which of your workspaces and documents you have shared with others:

• On the left navigation bar   A list of all your workspaces appears under My Workspaces. If you have shared a workspace with others, a sharing icon appears next to the name of the workspace. Alternatively, if you place your cursor over a workspace name, a menu appears that indicates who the Owner of the workspace is and whether the workspace is shared or private.
• In a workspace   A sharing icon appears next to any documents in your Documents workspace that you have shared. Alternatively, if you place your cursor over a document, a menu appears that indicates who the Owner of the document is and whether the document is shared or private.

In addition, Owners can track all activity that occurs on a shared workspace or document, including when a Viewer makes a comment or when an Editor makes changes. When you open a shared workspace or document, the Activity pane appears on the right, listing the date and time that each change was made to the shared item. For more information, see Manage your workspaces using the Activity pane.

Editors and Viewers

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When you accept a sharing invitation and sign up for Office Live Workspace to share documents with an Owner, you can view the shared workspace or document on the left navigation bar. Shared workspaces appear under Shared with Me. Shared documents, such as lists, notes, Office Word documents, Excel worksheets, or PowerPoint presentations, appear when you click Documents on the left navigation bar under Shared with Me.

To open a shared workspace, click the workspace name on the left navigation bar. Alternatively, place your cursor over the workspace name, and in the menu that appears, click Open. If you have Editor permissions, you can add comments and make changes to any of the documents within the workspace. If you have Viewer permissions, you can view all the documents and make comments, but you cannot make any changes to them.

To open a shared document, on the left navigation bar, under Shared with Me, click Documents. In the workspace list, click the shared document that you want to work on. A read-only version of the document appears. If you have Editor permissions, click Edit to make changes to the document, or click Comment to add commentary. If you have Viewer permissions, you cannot make any changes to the content of the document, but you can click Comment to add feedback.

Share a link to a workspace or document

Office Live Workspace provides direct links to your workspaces and documents that you can bookmark to share with those who have sharing access to that content.

Direct links are available for any individual workspace or document, with the exception of items located in the Shared with Me or Deleted Items workspaces. The link is the Web address that you see in the address bar of your Web browser when the document or workspace is open.

To share a link to a workspace or document:

1. In Office Live Workspace, on the left navigation bar, click the workspace for which you want to share a link.
2. To share a link to a specific document in the workspace, click the document in the open workspace.
3. After the page opens, use one of the following methods to share the link:
   • Send the link by e-mail   In Windows Internet Explorer 7, on the right side of the toolbar, click Page, and then click Send Link by E-mail. In Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, on the toolbar, click the envelope icon, and then click Send a Link. In Mozilla Firefox, on the toolbar, click File, and then click Send Link.
   • Copy and paste the link directly from the address bar of your Web browser   Click in the address bar at the top of your Web browser window, and then press CTRL+A to select the entire address. Press CTRL+C to copy the selected link, and then place your cursor in the desired location and press CTRL+V to paste the address.

 Note   If someone who does not have sharing rights to the content tries to access a link to an Office Live Workspace document, an error message is displayed.

For more information about sharing links, see Manage and share links to workspaces and documents.

Hide and restore shared workspaces

Over time, your list of shared workspaces on the left navigation bar may become long. One way to keep your workspace organized is to use the Hide feature, so that only your most important shared items appear under Shared with Me on the left navigation bar.

To remove a shared workspace from view:

1. On the left navigation bar, under Shared with Me, place your cursor over the shared workspace that you want to remove from view on the left navigation bar.
2. In the menu that appears, click Hide.

   

   The shared workspace no longer appears on the left navigation bar.

Keep in mind that this action only removes the shared workspace from view; it does not delete it. You can still access the shared workspace by clicking Shared with Me on the left navigation bar.

To restore a shared workspace to your Shared with Me list on the left navigation bar:

1. On the left navigation bar, click Shared with Me.
2. Select the check box next to the shared workspace that you want to make visible.
3. On the toolbar, click Show.

   

4. The shared workspace now appears under Shared with Me on the left navigation bar.

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