Get 5GB of Free Online Collaboration Space with Office Live Workspace

Imagine a world in which you can save documents directly to the cloud from within Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Imagine that it's a dedicated, shared space in which you can invite others edit, read, and collaborate on those documents, easily accessed from within their own copy of Microsoft Office. And it's free. That's Office Live Workspace: Free online document sharing from Microsoft.

Microsoft's Office Live Workspace is in beta, but access to it is being pushed down to Office 2003 and Office 2007 via Windows Update and Microsoft Update even as we speak, so check your optional updates to get yours.

Once installed, you get a toolbar in Office 2003 or menu options in Office 2007 to save and open documents in your private piece of the cloud. You can also access Workspace via the Web, where you can set up any number of custom "workspaces" - essentially folders for specific projects.

The interesting thing about these workspaces is that when you choose one from the list of workspace templates, you get some default documents designed for whatever project you are working on. Choose a "job search" workspace, for example, and it comes pre-populated with templates for cover letters, resumes, interview schedules, and job contacts. A project workspace has a schedule, PowerPoint deck, and to-do list, among other files. There are about a dozen workspace options, including a blank one.

You can share your stuff on a workspace or file-by-file basis, and there are video tutorials to get you going for all the major tasks. Office Live Workspace is a very cool - and unexpected - update to Office that is clearly trying to leapfrog existing cloud-based Office suites like Google Docs and Zoho.