The public beta service of the Apple iWork.com service, launched in 2009, will retire from 31st July 2012, according to a communication from Apple. iWork.com was a convenient place to share iWork (Pages, Numbers and Keynote) based documents with other users of Mac or PC and a useful feature was that shared projects could be viewed simply by using a browser.

Sharing documents, using iWork.com, was a simple process of  selecting the Share icon on the menu of the application and choosing an option from Share (with viewers), Publish (on the web), and Upload (for private use). Viewers could be selected by individual email address and be notified through an email message containing a unique link to the document – in a loosely similar fashion to SkyDrive.

With the launch of iCloud, which allows sharing of more kinds of file than just those based on iWork, the separate service is no longer required and Apple are asking users to backup their documents shared on iWork.com as they will no longer be available on the service after the retirement date.

However, one of the intended features of iWork.com was the ability to publish documents online to be viewed publicly whereas iCloud currently concerns itself with simply making files available between devices that share the same iCloud account.