Two weeks ago, Apple introduced iWork ‘09, the latest edition of the company’s office suite that includes Keynote for presentations, Pages for documents and page layout, and Numbers for spreadsheets.

iWork ‘09 comes with something completely new: iWork.com. This is Apple’s answer to online document sharing tools like Google Docs, Adobe Buzzword, and others. It is also somewhat related to wikis, and even SharePoint, although in a limited manner since the beta version has limited capabilities at this point.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been using these new tools, and I’ve put together a summary of my experience with the iWork.com beta. Read on to see what’s good, what could be improved, and what remains to be seen in future versions.

What’s Good

As with any Apple product, there’s a lot about iWork.com that’s already good. Apple’s “first draft” of iWork.com is as good as the final product you’d get from most other organizations.

Design

iWork.com sets a high bar for document sharing and collaboration tools. The interface is, hands down, the cleanest and most intuitive I’ve seen in any online document sharing tool. Apple has definitely lived up to its own high expectations here.

The interface has the polish, quality, and subtle details you’d expect in a desktop application. It’s snappy and responsive – there’s none of the lag you night expect in a web browser.

A “Navigator” on the left shows you the pages, slides, or spreadsheets just as you would see them in the desktop applications, and you can quickly move back and forth sequentially in a document, or jump directly to the part you want to review and comment on.

There’s a yellow “Add Comment” button at the top of the interface, and clicking it places a yellow digital post-it on top of the document. You can move the post-it around and place it right near the part of the document it pertains to.

In the right sidebar, there’s a space to leave general notes about the document. Just type a note in the space provided, and it’s added to a list that everyone else can see and add to.

Details

Even the smallest details are impressive. When I first logged in to iWork.com and opened a shared document, the right sidebar included my photo and email address. iWork.com took the photo I associated with my profile in Mac OS X on my MacBook Pro, and added it to my profile. No extra work on my part, and it’s a nice way to see who has published or worked on a document. This comes in handy when you’re working with people who aren’t in the same office, or even in the same city!

Downloads

When you share a presentation, document, or spreadsheet on iWork.com, you can choose whether others can download a copy of the file. You can also specify multiple formats, which is especially useful when you’re working with people who use a mix of PC, Mac, and other platforms:

• Documents – Pages ‘08, Pages ‘09, Word, PDF
• Presentations – Keynote ‘08, Keynote ‘09, PowerPoint, PDF
• Spreadsheets – Numbers ‘08, Numbers ‘09, Excel, PDF

What Could be Improved

Although iWork.com shows a lot of promise, it is only two weeks old and there are areas where it needs refinement to live up to Apple’s usual standards.

The Address

Apple is branding the service as iWork.com, but if you type http://www.iwork.com into your web browser, you won’t be taken to the iWork.com service itself. Instead, yourel be taken to a product marketing page describing the service. In order to actually access shared documents, you have to visit http://publish.iwork.com. That’s not intuitive.

Apple does a better job in this area with MobileMe, the company’s other web-based service. When you type in http://www.me.com, you’re taken to the home page for the MobileMe service. If you want to know more about the service, the home page contains a Learn more link that takes you to a product page.

Sharing a File Requires Mail to Launch

When you choose “Share via iWork.com” in Keynote, Numbers, or Pages, the prompt that appears asks you to enter the email addresses of the people you’d like to give access to your shared document. This part is expected, but something else happens that might surprise you: Apple’s Mail program launches (if it isn’t already open).

If you regularly use Mail as your main email program, it’s not a big deal, but if you don’t, it seems like an unnecessary extra step to launch a program when you don’t actually have to do anything in the Mail app itself in order to share a file.

Presumably, Mail needs to be open to send a message to the people with whom you choose to share the document, but this seems unpolished and unnecessary, and it takes extra time. It would be simpler to have a background process that can send the email without launching the Mail application. This is probably just a result of the fact that iWork.com is still in beta.

Login Process

When you visit http://publish.iwork.com, the login prompt doesn’t appear on the web page itself. Instead, it appears as a browser popup.

This is rudimentary, and doesn’t fit with the standard convention of putting login fields on the home page of a web app. In fact, it reminds me of browser login conventions from ten years ago. I can’t think of a strong reason why it needs to work this way, especially when the login for MobileMe appears right on the page.

What Remains to be Seen

Given that iWork.com is so new, there’s still a lot to be seen. What will it cost? Will it allow greater editing capabilities – perhaps full editing of documents – or stick to comments only? Will it integrate with MobileMe, Apple’s other web-based service for email, contacts, calendar, photos, and files?

Editing Capabilities

Will iWork.com allow you to edit shared files, or will it continue to only allow you to comment? Apple has hinted that greater capabilities are in the works, and it would certainly make sense to allow greater editing capabilities if they want iWork.com to be a legitimate competitor to services like Google Docs and Adobe Buzzword that do allow full editing.

Apple may be following its usual adoption strategy here: start with a limited capability that introduces people to the idea of sharing and collaborating on documents, but doesn’t overwhelm them with too much at first.

Many people have never edited a document collaboratively before, so this is a good way to ease them into this new way of working. If Apple does add greater editing capabilities, iWork.com may give those incumbent services a serious run for their money.

Cost, Storage Space, and File Expiration

Apple has hinted that they will charge a fee for the final product once it’s out of beta, with the somewhat vague language “Fees may apply.” So how will this work? Will there be a limited free level, with paid levels allowing more space to share and store files?

Right now, the iWork.com beta gives you 1GB of space. That’s fairly generous, but could fill up quickly if you share a lot of files. Perhaps a free tier could include this amount of space, and a paid tier could include significantly more space?

Apple says that files stored on iWork.com expire after 120 days. Presumably, this is to keep their servers from getting filled up with old files that no one accesses any more. Perhaps a free tier would keep this time-limit, but a paid tier could extent, or even eliminate this limit?

Going in a completely different direction, what if Apple doesn’t offer free and paid tiers, and simply charges for the service period. Would you pay to use it? I’m not opposed to paying. When services take the free route for too long, they run the risk of conditioning people to expect that the service will stay free.

Charging a reasonable fee helps ensure that people make the most of their investment, and Apple has shown with MobileMe that it thinks web-based services can be priced in the $99/year range. Personally, I’d like to see a similar arrangement if they do charge for iWork.com. I prefer annual fees to monthly fees any day.

MobileMe Integration

Will iWork.com integrate with MobileMe? If so, how? The most obvious overlap between iWork.com and MobileMe is file storage. A MobileMe subscription includes 20GB of storage space, and you can store just about any file type in your iDisk on MobileMe. But MobileMe is clearly designed as a personal storage tool, and lacks the sharing and commenting features of iWork.com.

It remains to be seen whether there will be any integration between these two tools, but it seems natural that, at the very least, MobileMe would display files you have access to in iWork.com, and iWork.com would allow you to download a copy of a shared file directly into your MobileMe iDisk space.

In Summary

iWork.com is young, but it has a chance to make significant waves in the nascent world of online document sharing and collaboration. It has some shortcomings, and still needs significant refinements, but overall Apple is off to a strong start with what looks to be a promising tool.