- Posted by acxede on August 5, 2008
Office Live's Applications fall into two broad categories: workspaces and business applications.
Workspaces are configurable storage locations for storing and sharing structured as well as unstructured information. They are web sites that you can create on the fly for a specific purpose or event – an important meeting, for example. You can store all the documents required for the meeting in a workspace tailored for meetings. You can then grant access to the meeting workspace to all the attendees so that they can collaborate on those documents. The meeting workspace has pre-built lists for the meeting’s agenda and action items.
Applications are not programs, as the word application commonly implies; they are basically views of data lists. You can’t use these applications to file your taxes or to keep your accounts, for example. The Expense application that comes with Office Live Small Business, for instance, is just a list of your expenses which you sort and view in many different ways. You can’t transfer the expenses to Intuit QuickBooks, as you might expect a real application to do.
Workspaces and business applications are, in fact, mini web sites. Although it’s called a web site, Office Live Small Business’s private web site is really a portal of several such mini web sites – an intranet, if you will. What’s more, you can create more sites on the fly, or get rid of existing ones, to suit the need of the hour. If you want to share information or collaborate with vendors, clients, or others outside your four walls, Office Live Small Business has got you covered. You can let these folks access information on your intranet on a selective basis. In effect, your intranet can double up as an extranet whenever you wish.
One of Office Live Small Business’s interesting features is that its private and public web sites can “talk” to each other. You can display a data collection form on your public web site, for example. When random visitors fill out that form, you can capture the information and move it to a list on your private web site. The mechanism works just as well in the other direction. You can display the data in a list residing on your private web site on a web page residing on your public web site. And the best part is you can do all this without writing a single line of code.
Let’s say you want to add a form to your public web sites to accept requests for more information. You then want to add these requesters as prospects in a business application called Business Contact Manager. Normally, you’d have to write a few dynamic web pages to do this. With Office Live Small Business, you can achieve your goal simply by clicking around the application’s dashboard.
But there’s a catch to this interaction between the private and the public websites - you must use the built-in web design tools to build your public web site. The interaction won’t work if you decide to build your public web site with your own design tool. Of course, there’s a perfectly good reason for this restriction: like the public web site, the built-in design tools are also based on SharePoint technologies, which makes the interaction possible.