eXpresso, an online collaboration tool around Excel spreadsheets, has upgraded its application to offer support for all versions of Microsoft Excel and for additional features. Users of Excel 2003, Excel 2007 and other versions will be able to access all features and tools that are normally used within in their Excel applications, as well as custom macros, styles, and formatting via eXpresso.
Previously, eXpresso offered limited functionality of Excel spreadsheets on its platform. eXpresso’s has also added the ability to let users create and market custom spreadsheet macros to others from within the eXpresso environment. Via eXpresso’s platform, users can hold live online meetings to discuss and update spreadsheets and you can control viewing options of other users. eXpresso subscriptions are $15/user per month or $79/user per year
eXpresso raised $2 million in series A funding in 2007. eXpresso’s drawback is that it only focuses on Excel and faces stiff competition from Zoho and Google Docs, which offer a suite of collaborative tools around both Excel and other offerings, including Word and PowerPoint. The company says that it is launching full support for Microsoft Word and PowerPoint sometime this summer. If this does happen, eXpresso could become a more serious contender in the document collaboration space.
Have you tried Microsoft Office Live Workspace? It offers users the ability to create, save, access, and share documents and files online (5 GB of storage for free!) and fully supports the whole MS Office Suite. There is even a plug-in for MS Office that lets you save your files to your online Workspace directly from whichever Office program you are using. Check it out and let us know what you think!
Cheers,
Kate
MSFT Office Live Outreach
http://www.officelive.com/
Being free is not a big deal (most web apps are using the freenium model). Office Live is a pretty weak product (a barebone Sharepoint backend and that’s stripped down to the core) compared to all the other collaborative tools on the market. There’s just too many limitations with it. I would just use Live Mesh — it’s a way more advanced product (and it’s free too).
Hopefully the web-based Office 2010 will be comparable to eXpresso so that Microsoft can shutdown Office Live.
Yes that’s why we use eXpresso! I found Office Live was nothing more than check in and check out. With eXpresso we can have multiple people editing the same spreadsheet simultaneously. It’s like google docs for excel.
Thanks for the feedback! We are working on addressing collaboration.
Best,
Kate
MSFT Office Live Outreach
http://www.officelive.com/