Before we get to that:

• ever had your email inbox explode because multi-megabyte documents were flying around?
• this in turn causes incoming emails to be rejected (and you usually won’t know this till it is too late)
• you went absolutely insane because there’s just no way to maintain a proper copy of a document that is being edited by you and your co-workers, or
• worse still, you actually lost some work because your version was inadvertently overwritten
• you started pulling your hair out when a few people were editing the same document, and you had the close-while-you-edit-then-open-while-i-edit vicious cycle
• your client’s mail server keep rejecting attachments for oh about a dozen reasons

Well, apparently you’re not alone. Unfortunately document management has always been a headache, hence the birth of complex systems to do this. But what if you don’t need a behemoth of a system? What if you just want to complete the freaking presentation preparation without blowing a fuse?

I am experiencing something just like that. Maybe not that crazy extent but awfully close. That’s when I came across something called Microsoft Office Live Workspace. The thing is designed exactly to allow a group of people to work on the same document (or a few documents). It’s an online thingamajig, so you use the browser to manage your workspace and the documents in them. You can also decide who and what to share. There’s 500mb of space provided and the service is free.

It is in beta though (but really now, all M$ stuff is beta ) so don’t come crying if you lose work. Having said that I plan to use this in the future as a means to allow concurrent editing, to efficiently share documents and to at least have a simple version management of the document.

To avoid MS Document insanity try it out - Store and share documents online with Office Live Workspace