Thursday, January 31, 2008

Use Office Live Workspace or Google Docs, or both?

I just signed up for Microsoft's Office Live Workspace, which enables you to store office docs online and share them with whom you see fit. Currently,I use Google Docs Beta for publishing, in fact I use a lot of App Gadgets on my google page, Blog Reader, wikipedia and Linkedin and Google Analytics for Adwords and my Blog. But despite the availablity of online competitors I still use Microsoft Office for documentation writing, which still is a lot more usable than the online products.
On using the Live Workspace, its quickly apparent the Google Document Manager is more mature, its easier to share the document in less steps and the UI feels more cleaner and less cluttered.
I do like the Desktop sharing function in Office Live WorkSpace, very handy for presentations along with the ability to create Workspaces for different projects and clients. A major benefit also is the inherent offline capability of Office. Google is looking to provide that functionality at some point, but its not there yet, either way Microsoft Office will still have more functionality and usability.

I will continue to use Google Docs for sharing, but as Office Live Workspace continues to evolve I will probably use that when appropriate also.

Thats the beauty of Utility Computing, you can pick and choose who and what you use, you can choose to switch or you can decide that both offer benefits and you will utilize both when appropriate.