The creator of Hotmail is having a crack at the online office suite market with Live Documents.

I’ve signed up but not received an invite yet. Of course I’ll take a look, but two things caught my immediate interest:

1. Uses Flash and Flex:

Built using RIA technologies such as Flash and Flex, Live Documents allow users to view and edit documents within any common browser on any operating system from anywhere.

2. Connected Desktop Client:

Live Documents gives you continuous two-way syncing of your documents and edits; between your PCs and the web and vice versa.

Sync is a big deal and would make this more interesting to me than, say, Google Docs in its present incarnation.

There’s integration with Microsoft Office and (in preparation) Open Office.