- Posted by acxede on August 14, 2008
Office Live Small Business and Office Live Workspace have their roots in Microsoft's SharePoint technologies. Naturally, SharePoint lingo has creeped into Office Live's help system, documentation, and reference. The terminology can be somewhat confusing to those new to Office Live. Here's a mini dictionary of Office Live terms:
A list, in Office Live Small Business terminology, is a database table. Its purpose is to store structured data. The elements in a list, which are analogous to columns in a table, are called list items. An employee list, for example, might contain list items such as the employee id, name, address, and salary. You can create a custom list or you can customize one of Office Live Small Business’s pre-defined lists – announcements, contacts, events, links, and tasks.
A view is named collection of list items from one or more lists. You can choose the list items you want to see from the list(s) of your choice and select the order in which you want them to appear. You can even apply display styles, summarize or aggregate list items, and paginate your views to generate custom reports.
A library, sometimes called a document library, is for storing unstructured data as documents of various kinds. It’s a sophisticated document repository. You can check-in and check-out documents from a library and monitor their versions.
An alert is e-mail notification that Office Live Small Business generates when a list, library, or document changes. You might receive an alert when someone updates a document you’re monitoring.
A workflow is an automatic movement of list items and documents when a user takes a series of business process-related actions.
A web part is reusable block of information. It consists of a frame, a title bar and a content area. It’s like a miniature dynamic web page that you can embed in another.
A business application is a web site that’s built with lists, views, libraries, and other SharePoint-based objects in Office Live Small Business. You can manage and share structured information with business applications.
Like a business application, a workspace is also a web site that’s built with lists, views, libraries, and other SharePoint-based objects in Office Live Small Business but its purpose is to collaborate on documents and projects rather than work with structured information.
A template is a blueprint of a business application or a workspace. A template contains definitions of all Office Live Small Business objects that make up the application or workspace. Templates allow you to clone applications and workspaces. If you conduct meetings in a certain way, you could build a meeting workspace to suit your needs and template it. Then you can create a new meeting workspace for each new meeting from the template without having to define content of the workspace all over again.
And there you have it.