After reading this quick article on slashdot I decided to try out Office Live again. I think I had tried it early on when they did a beta our announced it. So this morning I opened up IE on my home computer (which I don’t use that often at home) and went to office live (www.officelive.com). I had to create a new account with my Gmail email vs my hotmail email.
Since I use google apps very frequently I am using that as a start to my comparison. I use google apps for church, projects, and storing info I want to get to anywhere. The first thing I noticed when I opened officelive was that I had to install something. I was missing something called the liveoffice update 1.2. After installing and it trying to reboot I was able to make a new document.
Creating a new word document I was thinking it was all in the browser, but it appears that it uses my local copy of office. This is interesting because if I did not have office how would I be able to use the app. Overall the feel is very similar to sharepoint. Similar to sharepoint the action of creating and saving a document is a bit slow and difficult. I never know when to save or to close the document and if I have to save it locally or on the server. When using liveoffice it then prompted me again for a username and password when I tried to save. Come on.. I had given liveoffice that info when I first logged in.
After my first document I realized that liveoffice is not similar to google apps. The experience you have on google is fast and fluid. On Liveoffice I found that I had to enter in passwords and it opened office and took a while to actually save and use a document.
Overall just my 10 minutes of using liveoffice told me that I probably will not use it again. I know there are some great features above and beyond google apps (screen share, actual office documents, and shared calendars) but these are not refined enough for me to move over.
In the end I am sticking with google apps.