Office Live Workspace, the online document collaboration service from Microsoft, is now out of closed beta. It allows you to share and edit Office documents with others over the web, control permissions, and other online collaboration features. It also supports Firefox 2 on Mac OS X. You need Office to actually edit the documents (since editing occurs offline), but anyone with a browser can view and comment on the docs.

I've been using Google Docs for over a year now, and while it works decently, I sometimes miss the advanced features from Office, and it can be slow at times. I tried out Office Live Workspace this morning, and it definitely let me keep my desktop app experience. In fact, it felt mostly like WebDAV, albeit a slicker, better, easier-to-use version. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long as all your editors have Office installed.

There's a web portion that lets me preview documents, and invite others to view and/or edit them. There's also an Office add-in that I installed, which added "Save To Office Live" and "Open From Office Live" to all my Office programs, allowing me to interact with the service. I was pleased to see that Offie Live stores the revisions of your documents across changes, but I didn't see a way to compare revisions. You can get email notifications of when someone edits documents, but there's no RSS feed. Anyone with a browse can comment on documents, but all the comments are just stacked on the right-hand side -- you can't position a comment over a particular item in the document.

I'm looking forward to when Live Documents comes out of closed beta, because that service will allow you to edit documents online, or using Microsoft Office or Open Office.

So, Office Live Workspace isn't bad. If everyone involved is a Microsoft Office user, it's definitely better than emailing documents back and forth. And you do get the full power of your desktop apps when managing documents, which is a big plus for power users or less web-savvy users. And since you can view and comment on documents using a browser, even non-Office users can contribute to a small degree. But the lack of online editing and robust features mean that upcoming services like Live Documents pose a real threat as the web world gets more cross platform and online only.

You can view more some screenshots of Office Live Workspace here.

Wikia just released an open source social networking extension to MediaWiki, allowing anyone with a MediaWiki install to let their users create profiles, upload avatars, message each other, and do other traditional social networking activities. There are already a number of open source SNS platforms, but this makes for a tempting starting point for any wiki-centric community site.

ReadWriteWeb has a longer overview.

Well, I've had it. I must get at least a dozen "please join my crappy network" invite messages each week from Ning networks. I haven't yet found a way to prevent them from "inviting" me, and all the emails violate CAN-SPAM in a number of different ways (no "unsubscribe feature", no physical address).

Their FAQ says

“To protect your privacy, only your friends and certain members of social networks you belong to can send you messages on Ning. If you’re a member of a network, the Network Creator and Administrators can send you messages and you can message them back. Further, if you belong to any groups, the Group Creator and Admins can get in touch with you. In order to send another member of a network a message, you’ll need to ask them to be your friend first.”

But apparently any Ning network can send me emails like "Come join me on Lame Group on SpamNetwork...".

Just this morning I got 6 different invites from "Members Only Network", all within the space of 10 minutes.

So for now I would suggest not joining anything on Ning until they address their growing spam issues.

Edit: Ok I found the culprits -- the spams were coming from some of my Ning.com "friends." *sigh* I knew there was a reason why too many friends was a bad thing.

SubText - http://www.subtextproject.com/

BlogEngine - http://www.asp.net/downloads/starter-kits/blog-engine/

dasBlog - http://www.dasblog.info/

FYI we use dasBlog here, but SubText & BlogEngine look interesting ...

Unfuddle's forums has a discussion on alternate Subversion clients for Mac users.

SCPlugin is a free Subversion plugin that integrates with the Finder, and works similar to TortoiseSVN (a Windows SVN explorer plugin). Syncro SVN is a commercial standalone SVN client ($60) that works on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Most Mac users use the svn command line program, but I know from experience how handy TortoiseSVN is for me to visually view the state of my working folder, compare files, and other operations.

TechTarget has an article on how to set access control lists to define default file permissions. This came in handy for us, as we have several developers who work on our sites. The default file permissions would get annoying, as developer A would create some files which only he could edit, so developer B would have to use sudo to change the file permissions to a developers group.

With the TechTarget article, now all newly created files in our code directory are owned & editable by the developers group, making shared development much easier.

If you need to recursively FTP files (e.g. you're pulling down data, or doing offsite backups), take a look at lftp. It's normally available on Linux boxes. One nice thing is that by default it will only transfer changed/new files. You can use it in a script or cron job.

Rimuhosting has a nice FTP overview on how to use it.

ncftp is another, more powerful FTP client that is also worth checking out.

Another helpful page, using the Unfuddle API. Now users can submit a ticket into an Unfuddle project without having to log in.

We've been using Unfuddle for a while and have been pretty happy with it, although we always felt that the built-in RSS feeds didn't have enough information. Recently they released an API, and so we decided to make a new Unfuddle Project RSS feed, using PHP, that displayed richer information like times, people, and comments.

To install, edit the settings near the top of the PHP page to use your domain name, login, project id, etc, then load onto a friendly local PHP server. It requires PHP 5 due to use of the SimpleXML extension.

One thing to note -- the file doesn't contain any caching mechanism because different PHP hosts have different things available. So feel free to add in caching support, or lmk & I'll upload a version with caching included.