webdevmatt

I’ve been using ZOHO for most of my ad hoc “cloud” document sharing, and I’ve been relatively happy. Today I had a document in an Office Live Workspace that needed to be shared so it was time to give single document sharing a go.

As posted previously in “Falling in Lust with Zoho”, Office Live does a wonderful job of defining and sharing workspaces. From a Sharer’s point of view individual sharing is, what the French call, a bit Clunky. Workspace specific documents were not meant to be shared, and Office Live makes you “feel” that, and maybe that’s a good thing.

Being organizationally humbled by my experience with sharing out a single document in Office Live, I would like to thank Microsoft for making it difficult to do this simple task, from a previously established Workspace. The process for sharing a single document from an existing workspace is 1. drag the document out of the workspace into the main Documents section of Office Live(the site documents this move in the activity section of the workspace, very nice. If you are subscribed for notification you will receive a message of this move as well) 2. share the document to the email address of the person you would like to share the document with 3. put your feet up (if you want to stop sharing or share with more people at any time just open the document, click view sharing details, and click the button “Share with More People” or  “Stop Sharing”)

As a recommendation, if you are going to share with more people, you may want to start thinking about creating a Workspace. When working with Workspaces, it is the goal of the user to group like work that might be interesting to a focused audience of at least 2 :). The Workspace is a place where one should attempt to organize these docs for specific use. If this fundamental idea is engrained into our brains, you will be able to deliver written thoughts and other documents with some context, in Office Live, even if it is just the context of the name of your Workspace.

If I want to share an individual written thought, maybe it belongs in a dump zone like Zoho or the Documents section of Office Live. That nasty place where all documents reside, which, by the way is how I have seen document Workspaces traditionally used to people who love trees, file trees that is(we are creatures of habit who are married to our document tree and while the tree is not truly compatible with effective knowledge collaboration, like a failing relationship, we continue to “try to make it work”). The key to this tool, an Office Live Workspace, is to commit to the context of the Workspace and use it to provide rich information to your co-collaborators.

I know what you are thinking, “yeah, Matt got a dog”. If that what you were thinking, so sorry to disappoint, this is a different type of post.

If you have been a home owner who has lived there in the fall or spring, there is another thing a man cannot be without. It comes in the form of a square or rectangle in many sizes and colors ranging from plain grey to tri-color. For me, my best friend at home is my $10 Blue Tarp. You can put anything on this large piece of plastic; it won’t bark at you, beg or whine. It embraces the leaves you rake over it, and lays there as you overload it with pounds of brush, logs and twigs. As you drag it across cement and it gets a new hole every other trip, it grins and provides you with a sense of accomplishment as the lawn “trash” piles up to impressive piles on the curb.

Dogs are great, though I am a cat owner (they’re cool as well), but there is nothing like a blue tarp. It comes out 2 times a year, and hangs out quietly in the garage the rest of the year. No feeding, no soiling of the floor, no vet bills, just pure, unadulterated servitude making life that much better for its owner.

I LOVE YOU BLUE TARP.