This does mean that an account at Microsoft Office Live Workspace is required before the add-in can be used. The service is free on the other hand and it takes only a few seconds to signup for it. Windows Live account users can use their account to signup for Microsoft Office Live Workspace. The service is currently in beta and provides access to 5 Gigabytes of storage space for Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents that can also be edited on the website.

Office 2007 users find the option to upload their documents to the Microsoft Office Live Workspace and to open documents from the online storage space under the Microsoft Office button in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Office 2003 and XP users get a new Office Live toolbar that provides access to three buttons that offer the functionality to open documents that are stored at Microsoft Office Live Workspace, save documents so that they are stored online and to open the Office Live Workspace website.

The Office Live Add-in itself is compatible with Microsoft Office 2007, Office 2003 and Office XP.

The update adds a Microsoft Office Live Workspace Plug-In for Firefox which now allows Firefox users to open, edit, and save Microsoft Office documents in Office Live Workspace. The third update is the Microsoft Office Live Add-in for Microsoft Office which makes it possible to access the Office Live workspaces directly from Microsoft Office Word, Office Excel, and Office PowerPoint.

The final update improves the Office Live uploader making it possible to upload multiple Office documents at once. Supported operating systems are Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003. The required Microsoft Office versions are Office XP, Office 2003 and Office 2007.

If I had to describe the new service in a single sentence I would say it’s an online storage for Microsoft Office documents. Users can basically add, view and share documents online including the new formats – like docx – which Microsoft introduced in Office 2007. It is furthermore possible to create so called Workspaces which are basically folders for your documents.

It’s actually a little bit more than that but not that much. By default only a documents Workspace exists which will contain all documents that you upload to Office Live Workspace.

It is then possible to create new Workspaces, either blank ones or themed ones. The themed ones have names like Household Workspace or Job Search Workplace and add a number of templates into that workspace by default.

The Job Search Workplace for instance contains a Resume, Cover Letter and Interview Schedule Template. While the templates are a nice bonus for Office Live Workspace users their use is limited. The main difficulty that users will run into is the fact that you can view and delete documents online but not edit them. That’s the major point of criticism over at the Download Squad and their review of the new Microsoft service.

Files can be shared with users that you add to a specific workspace. Shared simply means that users can view the documents contained in that workspace. Users with access can leave comments which is a great feature. What I think is problematic is that there is no way to really share documents, like working collaboratively on them with a decent versioning control system. That would have been nice.

An Office Live Add-in is available for Microsoft Office 2007 and 2003 running on Windows Vista, XP or Server 2003.  It adds two functions. The first is that users can save documents directly from Microsoft Office into their Microsoft Office Live Workspace, the second that documents can be loaded directly from Office Live Workspace into their corresponding Office application.