Microsoft Bring Collaboration to Creative Business With Office Live Workspace

by Don Burnett

As a smaller design firm sometimes you spend more time dealing with client business issue than you actually do the creative design side of things. Well Microsoft has a new web based service that can help you save time with clients and handle things like project tracking and collaboration with clients with the efficiency of a much larger agency.

Most web-based creative businesses have their own websites to track client projects. If you are a smaller company, working with larger sized businesses it's always a challenge because they expect up-to-the minute updates on projects their progress and status information about work in progress. While this is something I didn't hear them talking about at Mix, I believe though it's something that smaller firms wrestle with every day.

Now there is a great solution for this, it's called Microsoft Office Live Workspace. Let's look at this and how it can organize your company and creative business.

Here is the Office Live workspace screen. Microsoft also offers an add-in for Office 2007 that lets you directly open workspace files from the FILE menu in your Microsoft Office applications. Even though this is very useable today, it would be nice to see this functionality included in Expression Studio, so you could upload files for client approval and collaboration right away...

It's also important to be able to control who gets access to your documents.. So you can set up who can edit and who can view project files.. You can also leave comments to viewers and editors on files in the workspace themselves, which is great for art approvals.

Now if you have ever worked on a project you know that version control is essential to keeping documents up-to-date and assets as well. Version control is not forgotten.. It's automatic in Office Live Workspace

Online file access for most Office file formats is also possible. It supports file formats such as PDF and Microsoft XPS formats. Even during File editing you have access to a lot of files. Right now XAML file types, and Expression Studio files have to be saved and opened in Expression Studio products directly, but can be directly from the workspace.. To support Expression Studio file formats all that will be required in the future is someone writing a preview module, much like people do for outlook file previewers today.

To-do list files directly integrate with Outlook's to-do function as well..

And that's the tour. If you don't have this connectivity with your customers through a company intranet/extranet or would just like a service that's accessible by clients anywhere, this is a great way to organize and get productive with your creative business..

Microsoft also offers Office Live's small business services that are companions to Office Live Workspaces offers the following services as well.

1. Create an online presence, including free Web hosting, easy-to-use site design tools, site traffic reports, and more (please note this while great for small business may not handle advanced web site needs, but is great for the typical small business).
2. Custom Domain and email.A custom domain and up to 100 business e-mail accounts—free for the first year .
3. Contact Manager- Manage sales opportunities, contact information, and track every interaction with customers.
4. Document Mangers- Store and share company documents in one central place for easy access and version control.
5. Collaborate and share information with customers, partners, or employees with password-protected online workspaces.
6. Project Planning- Plan projects, assign tasks, and monitor your progress.

Best of all it's FREE.. You can sign up right now.. Positives on this product for me the direct Office program integration (including all the new file formats) I don't have to leave Microsoft Office to post something and I use Microsoft Office products so I don't worry about incompatibilities, also we may see compatibility with Expression Studio format files in the future w. Microsoft is really pushing this for college campuses and students as well. I know there are other products out there, like GoogleDocs, and others but honestly I prefer to stay with the company that makes the Office products I use in the first place in this case. Also if they end up supporting Expression Studio file viewers my art approvals can go much faster.

Technorati Tags: Office Live Workspaces,Creative Business