Crabby Office Lady

As a small business owner, you know how important it is to have an online presence. Microsoft Office Live offers you a leg up when it comes to collaboration and site management.

You know that you need to create a Web site for your company. You know that it's one the best ways to reach customers, and you know that it will help grow your business — but you don't know where to start.

Maybe you've shied away from this project — creating a company Web site — because you feel you lack the technical expertise (not to mention the budget) to tackle such an endeavor. Rest assured, you're not alone. We've all seen some pretty awful Web sites out there, and a company's site, when it's not so great, can say a lot about the company itself. But then again, maybe the company sites you've visited — the ones that are hard to navigate, that have themes and colors that burn your retinas, that make ordering this year's "must have" whatever relatively impossible — really do have something to offer. But how can you know if you run screaming from the site? If this sounds like you (or if you're afraid it might be you), or if you haven't even considered creating a Web site, there is a solution: Office Live.

But what if you also want some sort of online collaboration tool that you, your customers, your vendors, your employees, and anyone else who takes part in your business can have access to? Setting up an external Web site is one thing; being able to set up one so that everyone can work together is quite another. It just seems so darn complicated and likely expensive. Again, there is a solution: Office Live.

What is Microsoft Office Live?

Office Live is basically a set of products that help you create an online presence for your business, whether it's to communicate with customers, to collaborate with employees or colleagues, to manage your own schedules, contacts, and tasks…or all of the above. It's a simple idea, and Office Live makes it simple for you to accomplish.

I'll detail the three core products and their features more specifically in just a moment, but before you guffaw at the "simple" part, listen to me a while longer. You're probably aware by now, that if you don't have a company Web site — to inform potential customers of what you offer, to share online workspaces with coworkers, or to share data and vital information with your customers far and wide — you're probably missing out on a lot of business opportunities, and perhaps more importantly, you're giving away business to your competitors.

As well, if you don't have a way for everyone to work together, whether they're at home or in the office, you're probably missing out on some of your employees' time and talents, not to mention your customers' and vendors' input. Collaboration is the name of the game these days, and Microsoft Office Live offers a few different solutions to help ensure that you're getting the most out of everyone.

Who is Microsoft Office Live for?

Maybe you have a personal Web page that acts as a repository for all your family and vacation photos. Or maybe you use it as a sort of blog to help everyone keep up with you, your adventures, and what's on your mind. And while I may consider some personal homepages to be scourges of the internet, they can be useful…to a certain extent.

However, Office Live wasn't designed for personal Web pages — it's a bit too powerful for that. However, I'm not saying that you can't use it for whatever you want...

What I'm saying is that Office Live is for business people, probably you small-sized to medium-sized business owners. With Microsoft Office Live you can create a public Web site while also maintaining a private site that's available and accessible only to other people in your company or to certain customers. The public site is a way to show off your products or services, and the private site provides collaboration and discussion features that enable everyone to work together without needing the same software running on their separate computers.

The three Microsoft Office Live choices and what they offer

There are three different Office Live products: Microsoft Office Live Basics, Microsoft Office Live Collaboration, and Microsoft Office Live Essentials. Each product offers different sets of features, and the one that is right for you just depends on what you want to do. Do you simply want to have a Web site and e-mail accounts? Or perhaps for collaboration capabilities, having an online workspace is what you and your company need? Or maybe you're in the process of growing your business and you need a lot of different things. Chances are, one of these three Microsoft Office Live products will give you exactly what you want.

 Note   Microsoft Office Live is in beta phase, which means it's being tested in real-world environments by regular users. During the beta phase, we ask small business owners and managers to sign up and experience the different features of prerelease versions of the three products. Beta users are incredibly important to us — we use their (hopefully, after you read this column, your) feedback to help ensure that our products are the best possible when we make them publicly available. During this beta phase, all three products of Office Live are being offered for free. You heard me right. However, we still require that you provide a credit card so that we can validate that you're legitimate — this helps us mitigate online fraud and phishing scams. After the beta period, two of the three products will require a bit of cash on your part. As well, at this point Microsoft Office Live is available only in English and only in the United States. However, starting in late 2006, it will be available in other countries and languages.

Now let's get to the nitty-gritty of the three products offered.

Microsoft Office Live Basics*

*Free during and after the beta period

If you're a small business owner or manager and you want to establish an online presence (get on that bandwagon!), Microsoft Office Live Basics is the way to go. We've made creating a professional-looking Web site much easier.

• Web hosting  Select your own domain name and let Microsoft keep your site up and running.
• Site Designer  This is an easy to use tool that lets you select from thousands of templates and navigation formats.
• E-mail accounts  You get five personalized accounts, and each one has 2 GB of space. You can also schedule and invite people to meetings and even share your calendar with anyone who has a Windows Live ID (formerly Microsoft Passport) account. You can set up filters to keep unsolicited e-mails (junk! argh!) out of your Inbox (and where they belong: out of sight). As well, Microsoft Office Live Mail is DAV-enabled, which allows you to access Microsoft Outlook Express or Microsoft Office Outlook from within Microsoft Office Live Mail.
• Storage and data transfer  You get more than enough space to promote every aspect of your business and plenty of bandwidth to allow lots of customers to visit your site.
• Site analysis and reporting tools  See how many people are visiting your site, what pages they visit the most, and their system and browser information. Then you can make changes as necessary.

Now you can see that if a Web site presence and e-mail is your main goal, Microsoft Office Live Basics is the way to go. It's easy, it's free, and it's free. (Did I mention that it's free?!)

For more detailed information, visit the Microsoft Office Live Basics Web site.

Microsoft Office Live Collaboration*

*Free during beta and starting at $29.95 per month afterwards

Sometimes all you need is a Web site. If that's the case, Office Live Basics is your ticket. But if you want to be able to collaborate and work with your customers, vendors, employees, and anyone else who has a hand in your business, consider Microsoft Office Live Collaboration. Its features let anyone from anywhere work together...on just about anything.

• Shared Sites  The Shared Sites feature in Office Live Collaboration lets you create any number of password-protected Web sites where you can collaborate with customers, suppliers, vendors, and employees. It's a great way to share your business information with people inside and outside the company, and you choose who gets access to what.
• On-demand business applications  When you need to collaborate on a project, you know how difficult it can be when everyone doesn't have the same software running on their computers. Office Live Collaboration offers five groups of online applications that everyone can access and use: Company applications (such as shared calendars and documents); Employee management (such as employee directories and expense and accounting tools); Customer management (such as Customer Manager, which allows you to view all your customer info at a glance, and customer support, where you can keep a running list of frequently asked questions as well as keep track of customer support incidents); Project management (such as Project Manager, where you can set up projects and collaborate with your team); and Sales and marketing (such as Competition Tracker, where you can create an online database of your competitors and estimates (where you can attach, view, and track proposals).
• Company information when you need it  Because Office Live Collaboration is hosted by Microsoft, you can access our data from almost any Internet-connected computer anywhere.
• Storage space  You get more than 50 MB of storage space for your online business data or Shared site content. Plus, you can always purchase more if you find you need it.
• Data protection  Security is key, and all your data is backed up daily for an added level of security and peace of mind. This means that any inadvertently corrupted or deleted files in your Web site or Shared Sites can be recovered by simply clicking a button. There is also built-in password protection for the business applications and Shared Sites.
• Customer support  Office Live Collaboration customers receive free 24-hour phone, e-mail, and billing support. We're here to make getting started easy and to help your business grow and thrive.

So, if what you're really in need of is a way to share information and collaborate with those inside and outside the company, Office Live Collaboration is the way to go.

For more detailed information, visit the Microsoft Office Live Collaboration Web site.

Microsoft Office Live Essentials*

*Free during beta and starting at $29.95 per month afterwards

Microsoft Office Live Essentials combines the best of Office Live Basics and Office Live Collaboration. If you need a company Web site and you need a way to be able to share information with those inside and outside the company, Office Live Essentials lives up to its moniker.

• Just like with Office Live Basics, you get the Site Designer tool, free domain name and Web hosting, storage data and transfer, and Web site traffic analysis and reporting tools. Plus, you get more advanced Web site traffic reports to track the effectiveness of your keywords on different search engines.
• Instead of the five e-mail accounts you get with Office Live Basics, you get 50 accounts with Office Live Essentials.
• Just like with Office Live Collaboration, you have access to all the different business applications for data sharing and collaboration.
• And, also like Office Live Collaboration, you get the Shared Sites feature, which lets you create a customer workspace, a human resources workspace, a vendor workspace, and an SBA workspace (for your Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting files).

So, if you need the best of both worlds — an online presence and a way to collaborate and share information — then Office Live Essentials is, well, essential.

For more detailed information, visit the Microsoft Office Live Essentials Web site.

A comparison of the Microsoft Office Live products

Now that you know a bit more about Microsoft Office Live and what it has to offer, I suggest you pop on over to the sites that I linked to within each product offering, do a little comparison shopping, and then make your choice. In fact, take a look at this table that gives you a bird's-eye comparison of all the beta products and what they offer.

And remember: Everything is FREE until the beta period expires in late 2006. What better way to figure out what you can do with your business?

"Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change. Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them." — Henry Steele Commager

About the author

Annik Stahl, the Crabby Office Lady columnist, takes all of your complaints, compliments, and knee-jerk reactions to heart. Therefore, she graciously asks that you let her know whether this column was useful to you — or not — by entering your feedback using the Was this information helpful? tool below. And remember: If you don't vote, you can't complain.