first take Microsoft's suite of online tools is designed to help small businesses build and maintain a Web presence and manage projects, contacts, and tasks.
Contrary to what its name might suggest, Microsoft Office Live beta is not an online version of productivity tools Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Instead, this hosted suite provides businesses with a staff of 10 or fewer with tools to build and host a Web site, manage contacts, and share projects. For free, the Basic service provides a company with a domain name registration, hosting, and e-mail, along with Web design tools and reports on site traffic.
Why give away the store? Microsoft hopes to snag a large share of the market of small businesses still looking to develop a Web presence and manage operations via the Internet. Plus, its logo (linking to Office Live details, of course) will appear on your Web pages. Plans for keyword ads and online shopping are in the works.
The Microsoft Office Live beta comes in three flavours, starting with the free Basic, offering site hosting and building, as well as e-mail support. Free only during beta (prices TBA), Collaboration and Essentials each provide 20 business apps, 50MB Shared Sites private work spaces with 10-user access, and phone support. Essentials adds more ways to analyse Web site traffic, along with 25GB of monthly data transfer, coordination with Outlook e-mail, and 50 e-mail accounts with a 20MB cap on attachments. Collaboration lacks the Web hosting and design features.
Page Designer enables you to edit a Web page to your liking without the need for any HTML knowledge.
Once you sign in and access the Microsoft Office Live beta Web page, it opens a screen that demands a domain name. There seems to be no way past this page, unfortunately, so you can't peek at any features without either registering a new domain name or transferring an existing one from your current host. Once you establish the domain name of your Web site, you reach a page loaded with options and tools presented in a two-pane interface that loosely resembles Microsoft Outlook.
You proceed with the Web Sites module by building a sample site using the Site Designer. The tool's drag-and-drop layout is straightforward and demands no coding, about as simple to figure out as other bare-bones page-building tools, such as those offered by Yahoo Small Business.
Beyond handling your Web site, Microsoft Office Live beta Collaborations and Essentials attempt to provide a one-stop shop for core business operations. We appreciated the sparse design of the Dashboard screen, which uses a two-pane layout and tabs to present a calendar and drop-down menus for Customers, Projects, Sales, Employees, and Company.
The 30 business apps included in the two paid packages can handle a sweeping array of chores, from keeping track of vendors to managing human resources. Microsoft Office Live beta Collaboration and Essentials manage customer queries, competition, media attention, employees, sales leads, sales orders and estimates, and events. You can filter and customize data to suit your needs. For example, the Customers module lets you view accounts by territory, rating, or activity and export the data to a hard drive. You can import from and link business contacts to Outlook and even create your own FAQs section on the spot. We liked the way the Project Manager made it simple to create a new project, and we hope to see similar project-tracking skills come to Microsoft Office 12.
Dashboard provides easy access to Office Live's business applications, Web Site tools, and Shared Sites.
Additionally, Live beta allows users of Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting to share data with their accountant.
We didn't run into any glitches while testing this beta service on Windows XP using Internet Explorer. Then again, we weren't able to make full use of the shared tasks in our brief tour. While Office Live beta was speedy overall, we experienced brief delays after clicking some links, a potential drawback for any business, especially those relying on a quirky Internet connection. The business applications seem most helpful as a shared work space for a small firm with employees in multiple locations. We look forward to further testing this package of tools as it develops.
Microsoft Office Live beta
Company: Microsoft
RRP: Free
