First update for Office Live Workspaces released

LiveSide - News blog - Office Live Workspace - first feature update goes live

"Office Live Workspace launched last December and just got it's first update, what's new:

• A new Activity pane to help you keep track of what’s happening in your workspaces and email notifications so ...
• New support for adding multiple documents to your workspaces...
• New permalinks for sharing direct hyperlinks to your workspaces and documents. Now you can bookmark individual workspaces and items in your workspace using the “add to favorites” tool in your web browser or copy the address bar and paste those links into emails to share with others.
• A new Share workspace UI to easily invite others to your workspace...

Besides these, other fixes and improvements have been made and the Office Live add-in has been updated. [GD: The "OLConnector.exe" linked here is still shown as V1, 11/28/2008... maybe the update to it is still pending]

Note on Office Live Workspace Registration:
US pre-registrants are invited into the beta on a first-come, first-served basis as quickly as possible. The service will be opened to the world and offered in other localized languages in 2008. You can pre-register at http://www.officelive.com/, ..."

I like the new permalinks feature. I've been holding off really using my Live Workspace until that feature was available (it should make sharing stuff much easier).

Also I'd been having "issues" with the addin on my Vista box. The open/save to my workspace just didn't work. I'd log in and then after a few seconds I'd get a standard file dialog, pointing at my local machine. I tried the uninstall/reinstall thing but still no joy. I kept meaning to look more into it, but mostly chalked it up to a beta issue.

Well after seeing this news today I gave it another try, trying to save a XlsX from within Excel directly to a Workspace. And it worked like a charm! So muss, fuss, it just worked (with my existing Workspace add-in install). Opening the XlsX from the Workspace, from within Excel was just as easy.

Now I can't say that this update fixed my issue, or that maybe Vista SP1, or the many Windows Updates before and since, but in the end it's working...

What is Office Live Workspace? Think SharePoint in the cloud (mostly, sort of, kind of). It's like a SharePoint document library, with additional flavor added...