Apple will close iWork.com and delete user documents on July 31, 2012
In an e-mail sent to users of the iWork.com public beta on Friday, Apple informed participants that they should begin migrating to iCloud. Apple has recommended that users sign in to iWork.com before July 31 to download all of their documents to their computer.
In addition, Apple has created a support document available on its website, informing users that the iWork.com public beta will be discontinued in July. There, Apple offers a list of instructions on how to download documents from the website.
"Last year, we launched iCloud, a service that stores your music, photos, documents, and more and wirelessly pushes them to all your devices," Apple's e-mail reads. "Today, there are over 40 million documents stored on iCloud by millions of iWork customers."
The iWork.com service launched in beta in early 2009. At the time, it was aimed at making it easier for iWork users on the Mac to collaborate with others using Windows and Microsoft Office.
Since then, the iWork suite of applications has also become available on iOS, with Pages, Numbers and Keynote among the most popular downloads on the iPad App Store.
The iWork suite and iOS5 also offers integration with the iCloud service, which launched last October. At the iCloud.com website, users can access their up-to-date iWork documents, synced through iCloud's Documents & Data service.
40 Comments
That sound suspiciously like their current estimated launch date for Mountain Lion.
Nice.
Makes sense.
Hopefully the iWork Mac apps will be updated to work with iCloud soon.
Hopefully the iWork Mac apps will be updated to work with iCloud soon.
Not likely. At least not in the sense that you imply.
iWork.com was for collaborative/group online editing/markup.
iCloud documents are only available to the individual.
It seems unlikely that they will introduce some kind of mickey mouse "permission to look at my private documents" kind of feature into the desperately simple iCloud setup. It would make it janky and overly complex just for the small minority of users who want to share access to a small subset of their documents.
I got this email too - While I'm certainly glad to see the iWork apps supporting Cloud storage, I did occasionally use (and found helpful) the collaboration functionality of iWork.com. It was nice uploading documents for people on my team who did not have access to Pages and for them to comment on and revise them. The service showed great promise, and now it's simply being turned down.
Sadly this is an area where the Microsoft web-based Office environment (and to some extent Google Docs) will be able to lead the way...