- Posted by acxede on December 1, 2007
Maintaining a web site is an expensive proposition. Just the domain registration and basic web hosting can cost in the neighborhood of $100 a year. If all you have to show for it is a few pages of information that no one is ever likely to see, the expense is hardly justifiable. The e-mail accounts that come with basic web hosting are just horrible; most people would gladly have a MSN or a Yahoo e-mail address instead but for the advertisement at the bottom of outgoing messages. Besides, few people have content to update on their web site on a regular basis. So, many say "Thanks, but no thanks" to getting web sites. Now Microsoft has introduced a new service called Office Live Small Business - Office Live for short - that will permit you to brush aside most such objections.
What is it?
- A hosted sevice from Microsoft sonsisting of web hosting and e-mail, an e-commerce storefront, and a suite of online business applications.
Cost
- FREE! (Additional charges for domain registration and e-commerce storefront)
Positives
- Free (more of less)
- Comprehensive feature set
- Easy to use
- Ideal for not-too-complex businesses and service businesses
Negatives
How to get it
Where to learn more
The marketing folks at Microsoft have an uncanny knack to come up with product names that confuse even the brightest of people. Office Live is no exception. So let me clarify at the very beginning that Office Live has nothing to do with Microsoft Office - of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint fame. Office Live is neither an online word processor nor an online spreadsheet. It is a web site building tool complete with domain name registration, hosting for one web site, a simple content management system, custom-domain e-mail accounts, a suite of business applications, and even an e-commerce storefront. The basic service is FREE. You read that right. FREE. No strings attached. But you're expected to pay $15 a year for domain registration and a monthly fee for the e-commerce storefront, if you avail of those facilities.
Whenever you get any online service free of charge, the first question that comes to mind is "Who is paying for it?" The usual suspect is advertising revenue. And Office Live is indeed supported by revenue from advertisements. The advertisements, however, do NOT appear on your web site. Only the web site's management interface and the e-mail pages - the pages no one else but you will see - will carry advertisements. Your site itself will be ad-free.
The registration is quite simple. If you have a domain name, the registration process will offer you two choices: transfer it to Microsoft's registrar or leave it at your present registrar and manage the DNS entries yourself. If you don't have a domain name, Office Live will offer to register a new one for you at for $15 a year. If you decide not to stay with Office Live in the future, you can transfer your domain to a registrar of your choice, or just leave it with Microsoft's registrar and pay the annual registration fees; the domain name belongs to you, not to Microsoft. You can register as many domains as you want, but each registration will need a different credit card. Why do you need a credit card to get a free service? Microsoft says it is a way to verify your identity. The never charge it.
You get twenty-five e-mail accounts with your custom domain name, such as you@yourdomain.com. Each mailbox comes with 2GB of disk space, antivirus, and spam filters, and is basically a remodeled and enhanced Hotmail mailbox. You also get 10GB of bandwidth per month and 500MB of storage for your web site. You can buy additional five-packs, if required. The e-mail addresses are glorified Hotmail (or I should say Windows Live Mail) addresses that bear your domain name instead of hotmail's or MSN's. But the most significant improvement is that the e-mail service provides an Outlook Connecter which permits you to use Outlook as your e-mail client. You can use it to synchronize mail with Microsoft Outlook. You can also use Outlook to manage to manage multiple e-mail accounts.
You build your Office Live web site with the included website building tools. The tools are geared towards novice users and are very easy to use. The primary container of content on Office Live pages is called a module. Modules can contain text, images, and links. You build a page by placing several modules on it. The process is like making a collage from scraps of paper. When you build a page, Office Live gives you an option to place it on the navigation menu and allows you to customize the page's properties such as the title and meta tags, which search engines use to index your site. The service throws in the standard bells and whistles as well. You can upload custom HTML pages and other documents to a documents folder, for example, and you can optimize individual pages for search engines and you can get visit statistics.
If you don't know HTML or don't want to be bothered with learning it, Office Live is tailor-made for you. But the ease of use comes at the cost of flexibility. If you know HTML and want to code your own site, or want to build it with a tool such as Microsoft Expression Web or Adobe GoLive, you'll have to let go of Office Live's design tools and switch to using the design tool of your choice. Keep in mind, however, that even if you switch to your own design tool, you can only have pure HTML pages on your site; server-side code is not permitted.
While these site-building and e-mail features are certainly significant, by themselves they don't unlock all of Office Live's value. The service becomes a real bargain if you plan to use Office Live's collaborative features. Web-based collaborative applications have become more powerful and easier to over the last few years. Naturally, businesses of all sizes have started implementing browser-based applications to conduct their activities more easily and efficiently. Intranets are prevalent now-a-days, with businesses that are large enough to host their own applications in-house, which have made collaborative endeavors easier. Small businesses, however, have mostly missed the intranet boat. Until recently, about the only affordable collaborative, intranet-like application available for little guys that don't host their own servers was a hosted SharePoint service. Now Microsoft has bundled some features of SharePoint into Office Live to offer a one-stop Internet/Intranet solution. These features allow you to build custom lists from random data items and apply custom views to them. They also allow you to build and share document libraries. Since Office Live inherits this functionality from Microsoft's SharePoint Services, you will be very comfortable with Office Live if you've used SharePoint before.
The building blocks of Office Live's collaborative features are Applications and Sites. Applications are views of custom data lists. They are not programs as the word application is commonly used to imply. So you can't use these "applications" to file your taxes or keep your accounts. An Expense application, for example, is just a list of your expenses with a custom view applied to it; you can't transfer them to QuickBooks, like a real "application" would be able to do. Microsoft has canned thirty-odd such applications for various purposes, such as listing employees, managing contacts, tracking company assets and monitoring progress of a project.
A site, in Office Live Essentials' parlance, is a container to group and hold applications. You can create Customer site, for example, by grouping customer list and customer projects together. You can then give selective access to the site to your colleagues, or even to customers. All those who have access to the site can share the data and documents on the site, which is a much better alternative than e-mailing documents and notes back and forth.
You can use sites creatively. If you have a meeting with a client, you can create a Meeting Workspace site that has the agenda, related documents, and reference materials. Or you can create a Team Site to exchange documents and information with members of your team. You can, in effect, create intranets and extranets at will.
Office Live applications are appropriate only for those businesses that have the need for people to share a lot of information and documents in collaborative projects. If you are a one-man plumbing service, you may not need collaborative features. But if you're tired of e-mailing documents back and forth, sending the copies of the same information to many different people, figuring out which of the 200 copies of the same document is the latest, or repeatedly collating information that you must extract from communications from the same set of people, you should try out Office Live's Sites and Applications.
If you visit Office Live forums, you will see several people complaining about Office Live's lack of high-end features. Some want blogs and forums. Others want custom shopping carts, payment gateways, and Java applets. What they don't seem to understand is that Office Live is aimed at people who want to keep it simple. For its target consumers, Office Live is a rare opportunity to get something for nothing (or for very little, if you're interested in the subscription features). If you belong to its target audience, Office Live is an outstanding value.
If you don't have a web site, if you are making do with a Hotmail address, if you are unhappy with your current site, or if you wish to consolidate your business information in one place, take a look at Office Live. It might pleasantly surprise you. But if you 're looking for the ultimate web-hosting power-package with shopping-carts, payment gateways, and what-not, you're barking up the wrong tree.