Firms will get a new tool for enabling mobile workers today with the release of a public beta test version of Microsoft Office Live Workspace.

Office Live Workspace offers a way for users to access Office files and capabilities when away from their own PCs. It is not, however, a direct competitor to
programs such as Google Docs and Zoho that make productivity applications available via the web.

Instead, Office Live Workspace acts as an adjunct to Office, letting users store files in the cloud and take advantage of collaborative capabilities through integration with its own SharedView technology. Users can also use the service to keep web-based lists and notes and the latest release supports the ability to upload multiple files and keep an activity log so that files can be discovered.

“We asked people whet they liked about web working and the answer was collaborative capabilities such as working on documents together,” said Eric Gilmore,
Microsoft Information Worker Group product manager. “People didn’t say ‘I need Word for the web’.”

Microsoft is not writing off the possibility of a truly web-based version of Office but Gilmore said there are no plans for such a release, noting the difficulties of replicating the rich feature sets of programs such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

In truth, Microsoft is highly unlikely to risk the vast revenue stream of Office with a web version, unless there is a significant market shift away from its cash cow. So far, there are no sigs of that happening with Office maintaining an almost total
stranglehold on the market.