The Office Live Small Business family of services and its history are bursting at the seams with naming foul-ups. Several of Microsoft's other products sound suspiciously similar to Office Live Small Business or one of its features. Consequently, here's a list of what Office Live Small Business is NOT:
Office Live Small Business began its life as Office Live – without the Small Business. Because it came soon after Google's Docs and Spreadsheets, everyone assumed Office Live was an online version of the ubiquitous Microsoft Office prompting someone to muse whether Microsoft Office would now be re-christened Office Dead. For the record, Office Live is not, and never was, an online version of Microsoft Office.
The subscription editions of Office Live include a rudimentary CRM application called Business Contact Manager, which sounded suspiciously like Microsoft Outlook Business Contact Manager, a desktop add-on to Microsoft Outlook in the Office suite. Incidentally, the two Business Contact Mangers are not directly related.
The subscription editions also include Workspaces, which many thought were related to the Workspaces in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. This time they were right, more or less, but as it turned out, Office Live's Workspaces couldn't interact with Microsoft Office applications. Both kinds of Workspaces are indeed SharePoint-based, but aren't related.
Microsoft has an online resource center for Microsoft Office users (http://office.microsoft.com), where they can get tips on using the suite, download updates and resources, and ask for help. It's called, of all things, Office Online. By now you can guess that it too has nothing to do with Office Live. To add to this nomenclature mess, Windows Live, the re-branded MSN with a slew of new services, was launched around the same time. The Live in their names led many to believe that Office Live had something to do with Windows Live, which it doesn’t.
Just when it finally dawned on people what exactly Office Live was, Microsoft decided to re-brand it as Office Live Small Business, in October 2007.
By the way, Office Live Small Business has nothing to do with Microsoft Office 2007 Small Business Edition, which is the small-business-specific edition of Microsoft Office 2007 and gets its name because it includes the by-now-infamous Microsoft Outlook Business Contact Manager add-on – which, as you now know, is no relation to Office Live Small Business’s Business Contact Manager application.
Why the re-branding, you ask? Because Microsoft has introduced a brand new service which lets you collaborate with Microsoft Office documents online as long as you have the Microsoft Office Suite on your desktop. This new service is called Office Live Workspaces, which has no relation to the Workspaces in Office Live Small Business, which in turn has no relation to the Workspaces in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Got that? Good.