New Features in Office Live + 5 Free GB of Storage

The Office Live Workspace Team has just introduced new features into the Office Live Workspace service – a free service which serves as sort of a “SharePoint-Lite” repository for saving, sharing, commenting on, and organizing your files. In addition to the service’s expansion to Eastern Europe, they’ve also added in some useful features which make document management a bit easier.

Most importantly, you can (finally!) use folders and sub-folders within a workspace. For me, personally, this was a much needed feature. Like a lot of people, I was creating new workspaces to keep files separate, but now they can be better consolidated.

Oh, and as far as how I’m going to be moving those files around? That’s thanks to another new feature – Cut/Copy/Paste. This replaces the old File/Move feature and will make it much easier for me to get the files back where they belong.

But perhaps what might be the best upgrade of them all is the upgrade in storage capacity. With 5 GB of free storage, I can safely say that I’m able to archive my entire collection of personal documents to the cloud.

Remember, you can store almost any files on Office Live, not just Microsoft Office docs – the only blocked files are those that could act as executables (see exception list) – a decision made to protect users.

Also, don’t forget to install the Office Live Update which includes the Office Live Add-in for Microsoft Office and the Microsoft Office Live Workspace Plug-In for Firefox along with some performance updates. This is an essential tool, in my opinion, as it helps bridge the gap between PC and cloud.