Office Live: Microsoft's Ambitious Online Suite Makes Its Official Debut Microsoft Wants You ... Badly Jamie Bsales
If yours is among the 50 percent of small businesses that don't yet have a Web presence, Microsoft wants you. It wants you so badly, in fact, it's willing to register your domain name and host your Website for free. Plus, it'll throw in Web-based design tools and templates so you can build your site, as well as business-class e-mail (meaning name@yourbusiness.com, not some unprofessional-looking Hotmail account) for up to 25 people.
Is there a catch? Sure: The Redmond giant is hoping you'll like its Microsoft Office Live online services suite so much that you'll decide to upgrade to one of its paid monthly service plans. But that's not the worst thing in the world. Once you get comfortable with the ASP (application service provider) model for your Website and e-mail, the other services Office Live offers will probably seem pretty appealing.
As we've noted before, Office Live has no relation to Microsoft Office (except for an Outlook-like e-mail component), and you don't get word-processing or spreadsheet functionality as the Office moniker implies — at least not yet. At the same time, we can't imagine that the service's use of the "Office" name was an accident, and with archrival Google already offering those features online, we're guessing Microsoft won't be sitting that one out for long.
But even without productivity apps, Office Live is certainly an ambitious undertaking — both for Microsoft and for a small business owner who commits to the platform. It delivers business-class Web-based e-mail, Website hosting and development, online collaboration and calendaring, online accounting, online file storage and sharing, entry-level CRM and project management, and more.
That fairly daunting list is made more manageable by a clean, consistent interface across all the different modules, featuring "dashboards" that give you an overview in each area and clearly labeled tabs for access to more specific areas of a module. And an omnipresent, context-sensitive Resource Center pane on the right hand side of the screen provides links to articles and advice about the topic at hand. So you can start with the e-mail and Web features, then incorporate other aspects as your comfort level grows.
Good, Better, Best
There are three Office Live service levels, delivering more features at each price point. The free Office Live Basic gives you domain-name registration, Website hosting (for a site up to 500MB in size), online Web design tools, site reports, 25 e-mail accounts (each with 2GB of mail storage), online calendar and instant messaging. While the price is right, note that member-facing pages (but not your public-facing Website) will display third-party ads placed by Microsoft, and that tech support is limited to online chat and e-mail requests (no phone calls, please).
Stepping up to Office Live Essentials ($19.95 per month) gets you phone tech support, plus 1GB of storage space for your site, 50 e-mail accounts with the ability to sync with desktop Outlook, shared workspaces and business applications (with 500MB of storage) for up to 10 users, and Office Business Contact Manager (an entry-level CRM app).
Office Live Premium (which we tested) costs $39.95/month and gives you 2GB of storage for your Website, plus business app and workspace access for up to 20 people (with 1GB of storage). You also get access to Office Live's project-management, document-management, and time-management modules.
