Apple hands iWork.com its P45

Apple will kill its iWork.com document-sharing service at the end of July, the company said on Friday.

In a support note, Apple said 31 July would be the last day anyone can publish new documents to the service from their Mac or iOS iWork productivity tools — although there would be little point in doing so before then either, as documents already shared on iWork.com will cease to be available.

"You can use iCloud to share documents between your computer and your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch," Apple said in the note. The post also explained how users can retrieve their iWork.com documents from the service before it dies.

The productivity-focused iWork.com service has been around since the start of 2009, although it never left public beta mode. The newer iCloud service covers online storage and synchronisation for a wider variety of content, from documents to apps and photos, and also replaces services such as MobileMe.

However, iCloud does not offer the document-sharing capabilities of iWork.com, and Apple has advised those who linked to iWork.com documents to remove those links before the kill date.

"If you have published any documents publicly [using iWork.com], make sure you remove links to the documents and embedded Keynote presentations from your websites before 31 July," Apple said in its note.