You didn’t think that Microsoft would just let Google get away with its increasingly popular Web-based office suite Docs&Spreadsheets, did you?

Don’t rush yet to believe that Microsoft put its successful Office suite online. It’s a long way until there although, as analysts predict, there’s a good chance that at least a portion of the functionalities included in the desktop software will make its way into the recently unveiled Microsoft Office Live Workspace.

For now, Microsoft only offered details about the roadmap it will adopt with its new offerings, including client, server and services software for people and businesses. These offerings will combine elements of client-based programs with software that runs large servers and new services delivered over the Internet.

During the course of the following months the Redmond-based giant will add more options for its potential clients, all grouped under the “Live” and “Online” brands.

The “Live” section will include services targeted at individuals, business end-users and virtual work groups, with focus also on providing ease of use, simplicity of access and flexibility. Microsoft said the “Live” offering will be ideal for situations where people either don’t have access to professional technical expertise or don’t require high levels of system management.

The “Online” version of the Office suite will have a more select audience, mainly IT professionals who need more power and flexibility. With this, Microsoft expands its portfolio of services, which now include on-premise implementations of Office solutions, services hosted by Microsoft partners and now Online services that reside in Microsoft’s datacenters.

“This new era of connected computing is about empowering people and businesses to balance the power of the Internet with the rich interactivity and high performance of client and server software,” said Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division. “With today’s announcements, we are taking a significant step forward by combining our deep client and server software experience with our strong commitment to delivering flexible services offerings for our wide variety of customers and their unique needs.”

There are two new online services that Microsoft revealed yesterday: one is the Microsoft Office Live Workspace and the other is Exchange Labs. An update to Microsoft BizTalk Services has also been made available and customer and partner support for Microsoft Dynamics Live CRM has also been extended.

“The new offerings and programs that we are announcing today represent the next phase of the division’s strategy for online services. Most importantly, they demonstrate our dedication to and progress in the area of online services,” added Raikes.

Microsoft Office Live Workspace is totally free and it basically allows users to access their documents from virtually everywhere, with the opportunity to modify, organize and share them without or with administrator restraints. Users can save more than 1,000 Microsoft Office documents to one place online and access them via the Web.

With Microsoft Office Live Workspace users can set what their potential customers get to see- so basically a workspace is a simple, self-service Web site where users can share news and announcements, product information, important dates, and answer questions that their customers might have.

Users can also build a particular space for a particular customer, but this is a feature included only in Microsoft Office Live Essentials and Microsoft Office Live Premium. For the customer workspace to be functional users must first add the info their client needs/is allowed to see and later share the ID and password-protected workspace with the client.

Creating a workspace for a specific client is easy because Microsoft is providing through the Live Workspace online interface everything you need. Microsoft Office Live Workspace has built-in Web page components for presenting announcements, calendars, links, documents, pictures and other types of content that you want to share. These components - called "Web parts" - can be added and deleted from your workspace, and customized to work just the way you want. You decide what information is displayed on the page and don't need to know how to code or use HTML to make it happen. Microsoft even added a dashboard for quick access to vital/interesting information users want to share with their customers.

The list of components available in the beta version of Office Live Workspace includes:  document library (a place where visitors can view documents and other files you want them to see), picture library (a place where you can store pictures and display them as thumbnails or in a slide show, and make them available to download), announcements (a place to list news items and other short bits of information you want to share with customers), discussion board (a place where customers can comment and carry on newsgroup-style discussions), links (a place where you can create links to other helpful Web pages your customers may want to visit), calendar (a place to show upcoming events) and survey  (a place to pose questions and poll your customers).

Since all modifications brought to the workspace are in real-time and are tagged with details concerning hour, person who modified and so on, clients can expect the workspace to be a reliable source of up-to-date information about the business relationship.

A key feature of a Microsoft Office Live workspace is that users are in full control over who gets to visit the workspace site. If they want only certain customers to access the information there they can do that and they can also forbid access to rivals. Moreover, Microsoft gives the Office Live Workspace customers super-user privileges, enabling them to determine what a client can do and cannot do in the workspace, by assigning a role. Depending on the role users assign, a business client might be able to only read information posted in the workspace, or read and edit information, or read, edit and make alterations to the site itself. The client is always informed about his “role” and his privileges, because Office Live Workspace automatically sends an e-mail containing those details and what they need to do to gain access to the workspace.

“Office Live Workspace will provide anywhere-access to Office documents, including Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. In other words, these documents will go wherever people go when they’re away from their usual desktop. People will be able to work on documents from any Microsoft Office-equipped computer with an Internet connection – or review and comment on documents on devices that only offer Web access.

People also will be able to collaborate on documents and share information with friends, colleagues or classmates simply by sending an e-mail and inviting them to a password-protected online workspace. This will help people avoid the pain of trying to find the latest version of a document, or having to pull together multiple versions of documents. They can also easily post files to their dedicated password-protected online workspace directly from the Office application in which they’re working,” said Raikes.

Microsoft also revamped the former Microsoft Office Live service for small-businesses, which will from now on be known as the Microsoft Office Live Small Business.

The update announced for BizTalk “enables companies to connect their business systems more simply than in the past, using identity and network federation technologies. This update makes it possible to create new types of connected applications simply. In the past, this has been impractical or impossible. We will announce plans for pricing and commercial licensing by the end of the year,” added Raikes.

As for the “Online” offering, he said: “Online service offerings from Microsoft are for organizations with more advanced IT needs where power and flexibility are critical. These services will give businesses the ability to control access to data, manage users, apply business and compliance policy, and meet high availability standards while providing performance, scalability, security, management features and service-level capabilities to support mission-critical applications and systems.

Our announcement today illustrates how software such as Exchange Server, Office Communications Server and SharePoint Server will be available for customers to run on-premise or hosted in the cloud by Microsoft or hosted by value-add partners.  Our customer chooses the delivery model, same great technology and can then choose to move back and forth over time to continue to leverage skills, investments and data. It’s a winning solution for our customers. Either way, they receive the same great technology.”

It's clear that Microsoft's aim with this new batch of updates and offerings is Google's Docs&Spreadsheets offer, which, at a scaled-down version, offers (almost) the same functionalities, and also for free.