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Office Live - what is it?

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As you might have guessed from my post on March 31 about dragging mail to the Date Navigator to make an appointment, I had a meeting on Friday morning to learn more about Office Live. I went into the presentation expecting to learn why it was important to have online wordprocessing of some such thing, but I was completely wrong - Office Live is the start of something really cool for small businesses.

Turns out that Office Live is all about giving small business an online presence - for free - and providing extra tools for a nominal fee (approximately $29.95 a month.) After talking to small business owners at the NAPO conference, I think OfficeLive will be great for them, especially as they use it with the next version of Office ;-).

There are three levels of Office Live - Office Live Basics, Office Live Collaboration, and Office Live Essentials. Office Live Basics is free and includes a website with a domain that the customer owns (not Microsoft), and 5 free e-mail accounts with their domain, each with 2GBs of storage. It also includes an online tool to build the website and online web traffic monitoring so that customers can monitor how many people visit their site. Here is just a tidbit that might get some of you interested in Office Live Basics:

Use your calendar to interact with others: You can schedule and invite people to meetings, or even share your calendar with anyone who has a Microsoft Passport account.

Office Live Collaboration and Office Live Essentials each include more business related tools. The Collaboration package includes shared calendaring, to-do lists (oh my!), employee management tools, project management tools, contact management tools, etc. (There is a lot there.) The big deal with Office Live Collaboration is the ability to created shared sites - an intranet for your small business. One of the cool features is that you can create an internal site for a project, and then share that site with your customers. Office Live Essentials combines aspects of Office Live Basics and Office Live Collaboration. For a full comparison, click here. 

In any case, I thought it was pretty cool. For more, check out their blog: https://spaces.msn.com/officeliveblog/blog/

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 12, 2006
    Two comments were accidentally deleted from this blog post. I will restore them shortly.
    -Melissa

  • Anonymous
    April 12, 2006
    Matt Rolak has made a new post: re: Office Live - what is it?.



    Glad you found Office Live interesting ;-)  if you have any further questions look to the blog or drop me an email and I can help point to the 'right' person ;-)

  • Anonymous
    April 12, 2006
    AdamB has made a new post: re: Office Live - what is it?.



    Do all these calendaring and tasks features sync with Outlook automagically, scheduled, manually, not at all?

  • Anonymous
    April 12, 2006
    In response to AdamB's comment, Office Live sync's with Outlook with the Essentials package. It works much like SharePoint.

    -Melissa

  • Anonymous
    April 13, 2006
    If you cannot access Office Live Mail with Outlook etc. in the Basic package, can you set up automatic email forwarding to a different email account?  That way you could at least access email sent to Office Live Mail with Outlook from your own POP3 email account.

  • Anonymous
    June 14, 2006
    I saw the tip about being able to share your calendar vie Office Live Basic, butI don't see how that is done.  Is there a site or instructions I am missing??

  • Anonymous
    August 07, 2006
    Is it possible to set up an office live basic account and use outlook express from my laptop to retrieve email?

    It'd be nice not to have yet another interface I have to access to get email, but I cannot find any docs on how to do so.

    James

  • Anonymous
    December 13, 2006
    I want to access my Office Live email from My Yahoo.  How do you set up email forwarding from Office Live Basic email?  What is the mail server name?

  • Anonymous
    December 29, 2007
    I need to manage and share jpg files (scanned docs) and ms-word files. How office live can help me? what plan to choose.

  • Anonymous
    January 07, 2008
    Managing and sharing Office documents is best done with Office Live Workspace. You can sign up and learn more at http://workspace.officelive.com

  • Anonymous
    January 17, 2008
    The comment has been removed