Coming Soon To A Dorm NearYou: Microsoft Office Live Workspace New Free Internet Service Offering Students Their Own Group Study Hub Online: Now The Dog Can Eat Your Homework And You Can Still Be An ‘A’ Student! (NAPSA)—Looking for a better way to connect and collaborate with your classmates on group class assignments and juggle that crazy study schedule with a social life that makes Paris Hilton look like a wallflower? With Microsoft Office Live Workspace, students can radically streamline the way they work together. Andit’s free—totally! So what exactly is Office Live Workspace? Well, it’s just that: a workspace, online; your very own Internet group study hub in which to store and organize hundreds of Microsoft Office documents and otherfiles. With Office Live Workspace, the majority of your digital goods—lecture notes and term papers in Word, class presentations in PowerPoint or PDF formats, even photography projects—can have a home online where you can access and share them with professors and classmates (many heads are better than one—right?). Use it to create your own group study sessions on the fly, composeto-dolists, and project task lists and virtual notes that others can update, too. Andit’s a snap to track important academic data such as class schedules, assignment deadlines and gerade point averages. You can do all this with the knowledge that you control the door policy, so there’s no unwelcome gate-crashers. A simple e-mail, as if you were sending out a party invitation, is all it takes to invite people to join your workspace, and you even get to decide who has editing rights and who can simply review documents. Go on; unleash your inner control freak! Unlike freshman trigonometry, there’s a minimal learning curve. Office Live Workspace replicates the look and feel of the Office applications you already know and interfaces seamlessly with them. You can pull down documents from your workspace to work on, on your PC, or synchronize contact, task and eventlists with Outlook. You can also wave good-bye to the scourge of “version control.” With Office Live Workspace, there’s no more manual sharing of documents by e-mail or laborious merging of different versions of documents from multiple people. Instead, classmates and faculty members provide input and make changes to the same document posted to the workspace, but you can still keep score of all previous versions, so nothing getslost. And because we know college life is not all work, Office Live Workspaceis good for stuff besides study. Use it to plan events, coordinate activities, organize club meetings and sports practices, and generally manage your hectic social life. At the heart of Office Live Workspace is the capability to share information in a far more streamlined fashion. People can update their availability for everyone to see, because everyone'sliterally on the same page. All this, and you can log on to Office Live Workspace and retrieve your term paper from virtu- ally any computer with an Inter- net connection, whether it’s a friend’s laptop in his or her dorm room, at home on the family desk- top, or a communal PC in an Internet caf in Cozumel, Mexico, during spring break! Yes, the dog can now eat your homework—or at least your hard drive can—and you don’t have to sweatit! Oh, and did we mention Office Live Workspaceis free? Usingit is as easy as preregistering at www.officelive.com/edu. Register now—that’s today’s homework! And pin that Web address to the fridge for your friends to see alongside the phone number to the pizza delivery guy! Faculty Members Can Get With The Program, Too Office Live Workspace is not just for students. Faculty members can also use it to engage with students where they already are —online—in the way they like to work. Create a class hub for students to post papers to and get grades and feedback—no more need to deal with the hassle of receiving student assignments in multiple, easy-to-miss e-mail attachments. Also, use Office Live Workspace as a platform to dis- tribute assignments or course material, especially when everyone’s dispersed betweenclasses. Office Live Workspace means that, wherever you go, the docu- ments that are important to you follow. No need to save information to flash drives or to e-mail yourself documents to work on later. Access important projects when you're at conferences or out in the field using virtually any computer with Web access. It’s free. To use Office Live Workspace, simply preregister at www.officelive.com/edu.
