Apple to close iWork.com service on July 31st, tells users to use iCloud instead

In an email to customers, Apple has announced that their iWork.com beta service will be shutting down effective July 31, 2012. The service was launched in early 2009 in concert with iWork ’09, and has served as an online method for document sharing and commenting.

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.compublic 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.

Apple tells users that iCloud, since its launch last fall, has grown popular enough to be a fitting replacement. The company recommends users to switch to iCloud’s Documents in the Cloud feature. In this email, Apple has also announced that forty million documents have been stored in the iCloud since the feature’s launch last year.