Apple sent an email notice out this week to users registered for its iWork.com beta, stating that they are discontinuing the service as of July 31 and Apple will no longer let users publish or share documents through the service. The discontinuation comes as Apple places its focus on iCloud, which offers users ways to keep documents in sync among their various iOS devices.

Notice

Dear iWork.com user,

Thanks for participating in the iWork.com public beta.

Last year, we launched iCloud, a service that stores your music, photos, documents, and more and wirelessly pushes them to all your devices. Today, there are already over 40 million documents stored on iCloud by millions of iWork customers. Learn more about iCloud.

With a new way to share iWork documents between your devices using iCloud, the iWork.com public beta service will no longer be available. As of July 31, 2012, you will no longer be able to access your documents on the iWork.com site or view them on the web.

We recommend that you sign in to iWork.com before July 31, 2012, and download all your documents to your computer. For detailed instructions on how to save a copy of your documents on your computer, read this support article at Apple.com.

Sincerely,
The iWork team

iWork.com was initially launched as a free beta in January 2009, with the intention to offer the service with tools for collaboration on iWork documents for a fee. The service never exited beta, however, and with iCloud offering new options for moving documents around the company has decided to eliminate the program. But while iCloud does offer a number of new features, it does not offer the level of collaboration tools envisioned for iWork.com.

The elimination of iWork.com will come a month after Apple officially shuts down its MobileMe services. Apple has continued to support MobileMe since the introduction of iCloud last year in order to give users time to move over to the new service. But as of June 30, MobileMe and several of its features such as iDisk, Gallery, and iWeb publishing will no longer be available.

The following is an extract from the Apple’s official guide to save your iWork.com documents to a computer.

How to save your documents to a computer:

To save a copy of your documents shared on iWork.com, sign into www.iwork.com before July 31, 2012. Then, download all of your documents to your computer. You should do this as early as possible.

Here are steps to download your documents from iWork.com:

1. Go to www.iwork.com from a web browser.
2. Sign in with the Apple ID and password you previously used with your iWork.com account.
3. In the Shared Documents page, you will see all of the documents you have shared using iWork.com. Click the download arrow associated with the documents you want to download and preserve.
4. When the drop-down menu appears, select the format you want for your download by choosing from the available options: iWork 09, Microsoft Office, or PDF.

Please note that if you have published any documents publicly, make sure you remove links to the documents and embedded Keynote presentations from your websites before July 31, 2012.

For more information check the link below.

Link: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5042