Office Live Workspace, the online document collaboration service from Microsoft, is now out of closed beta. It allows you to share and edit Office documents with others over the web, control permissions, and other online collaboration features. It also supports Firefox 2 on Mac OS X. You need Office to actually edit the documents (since editing occurs offline), but anyone with a browser can view and comment on the docs.

I’ve been using Google Docs for over a year now, and while it works decently, I sometimes miss the advanced features from Office, and it can be slow at times. I tried out Office Live Workspace this morning, and it definitely let me keep my desktop app experience. In fact, it felt mostly like WebDAV, albeit a slicker, better, easier-to-use version. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as long as all lowest price on online order of kamagra your editors have Office installed.

There’s a web portion that lets me preview documents, and invite others to view and/or edit them. There’s also an Office add-in that I installed, which added “Save To Office Live” and “Open From Office Live” to all my Office programs, allowing me to interact with the service. I was pleased to see that Offie Live stores the revisions of your documents across changes, but I didn’t see a way to compare revisions. You can get email notifications of when someone edits documents, but there’s no RSS feed. Anyone with a browse can comment on documents, but all the comments are just stacked on the right-hand side — you can’t position a comment over a particular item in the document.

I’m looking forward to when Live Documents comes out of closed beta, because that service will allow you to edit documents online, or using Microsoft Office or Open Office.

So, Office Live Workspace isn’t bad. If everyone involved is a Microsoft Office user, it’s definitely better than emailing documents back and forth. And you do get the full power of your desktop apps when managing documents, which is a big plus for power users or less web-savvy users. And since you can view and comment on documents using a browser, even non-Office users can contribute to a small degree. But the lack of online editing and robust features mean that upcoming services like Live Documents pose a real threat as the web world gets more cross platform and online only.

You can view more some screenshots of Office Live Workspace here.