Real time Sharing Of Microsoft Office Documents And Applications is now possible thanks to Live Documents. Sabeer Bhatia the co-founder of Hotmail, the web-based e-mail service bought by Microsoft for $400 million a decade ago has co-founded Bangalore-based InstaColl which launched an online office productivity suite – Live Documents, with all the features of Microsoft Office 2007 and is available online for free.
Instacoll  Instant Collaboration Software Technologies suite ‘Live Documents’, offers functionalities similar to Word, Excel and PowerPoint and allows users to work collaboratively on them online.Documents would be completely secured on the Net as they are encrypted in the back-end. The user can give digital rights on who should open the document. Live Documents has been developed with Java and Flash and it would work across platforms.
Bhatia’s offering is similar to Google Docs, but uses synchronization between offline and online usage automatically, a feature now available with paid-for Microsoft-based technologies.
Live Documents is free for personal use, with commercial versions made available for enterprises in hosted form and on-premise server. An offline version of Live Documents will be made available in a couple of months.
Bhatia along with Soft Bank China and India Holdings have invested in InstaColl. The company already has Aricent (earlier known an Flextronics) as its first enterprise client. Almost 7,000 employees of Aricent will be using this application.
