Getting started with Business Applications
Microsoft Office Live Small Business makes it easy to manage and track all of the information that you need to run your business or organization. Business Applications is a collection of password-protected lists, libraries, workspaces, and tools that help you collaborate with clients and coworkers.
Business Applications
can be customized to meet your business needs. You can use the Document Manager and Team Workspace applications that are automatically added to your account and create your own custom applications based on these two applications.
In this article
Applications
An application is a collection of Web-based lists, libraries, calendars, blogs, wikis, and other pages used to help you share information and manage an area of your business, such as your projects, documents, and company information.
When you start using Business Applications, two applications are already added to your account:
- Team Workspace lets teams quickly organize, create, and share information with the people in your company. It provides lists for managing announcements, calendar items, tasks, discussions, favorite links, and also includes a document library.
- Document Manager contains a document library and a picture library. Use Document Manager to store, share, and monitor the versions of your business documents in a central location.
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A tour of the Team Workspace
The Team Workspace is the place for you to share lists, documents, and more with the people in your company or organization. Only the people to whom you give permission can access a Team Workspace.
The following shows the main elements of a Team Workspace:
- The Dashboard acts as a home page for the Team Workspace and provides a quick overview of the information contained there. The dashboard opens when you click Team Workspace in the left navigation bar.
- Team Workspace lets you switch between two different ways of viewing the information in the dashboard:
- Company view is the view of the dashboard seen by everyone who has access to the Team Workspace. The account owner or administrators can configure the company view to show the information that the organization uses most often.
- Personal view is your own customizable view, which lets you set up the dashboard to show the information you need to do your job every day.
- The Add link is the way to add lists, libraries, and calendars to a Team Workspace.
- The edit link allows you customize the dashboard by adding, removing, or modifying items.
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A tour of Document Manager
Document Manager contains libraries that let you collaborate on, store, share, and monitor the versions of your business documents in a central location.
The following shows the main elements of Document Manager:
- The Document Library lets you collaborate on, share, store, and monitor the versions of your documents in a central location.
- The Picture Library lets you store, share, and monitor the versions of pictures and images in a central location.
- The Add link is the way to add lists, libraries, and pages to the Document Library.
- The actions bar contains all of the options that you need in order to manage your libraries. Create, upload, edit, export, and print your documents, change the Document Manager settings, set up e-mail alerts to notify you about changes to documents, and more.
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Add more applications
In addition to Document Manager and Team Workspace, you can create new document management and workspace applications and add them to your account at no extra cost.
To add more applications, click Add Application on the left navigation bar. Click either Document Manager or Team Workspace, add your title and URL, and then click OK. The application appears on the left
navigation bar, and is ready to use.
See also: Add an application to your account.
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Using the Sharing sidebar
The Sharing sidebar appears on the right side of all list, library, and calendar pages that are contained within Business Applications, and on the right side of pages contained in Contact Manager. The Sharing sidebar is a convenient way to manage permission levels and add new user accounts, and is also a quick way to publish a list or add a form to your public Web site.
Managing users
When you click Users in the Sharing sidebar, you see two different options for managing users’ permissions:
- Manage permissions for this application lets you manage users’ permissions specifically for the application you're currently working in. Any of these changes can be made without leaving the application or disrupting whatever task you were performing.
- Manage all users makes it easy to change permissions across several applications at once, or to add many new users to your account at the same time.
See also: Manage permissions using the Sharing sidebar.
Publishing a list or adding a form to your public Web site
Office Live Small Business contains several lists in Business Applications and Contact Manager, such as a Projects list or a Document Library, that you can use to store the information you need to reference often as part of your business day. You can also choose to display information from these lists on your public Web site, so visitors can see it. When you change information in the list, the information displayed on your public Web site is updated automatically.
You can also collect information from visitors to your public Web site by adding a Form Designer module. Visitors to your public Web site type information into a form that is connected to a list in Business Applications or Contact Manager.
See also: Collect customer information using a Web page and Display a list on your public Web site.
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How Business Applications helps protect your information
Office Live Small Business gives you the option of transferring your information across the Internet using the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol. SSL uses encryption to provide an extra layer of security for the private information you send in e-mail, Web browsing, and other data transfers. This helps to ensure that the information cannot be intercepted or tampered with.
SSL is not automatically turned on when you start using Office Live Small Business. Enabling SSL may cause your Office Live Small Business features to run more slowly, and not all accounts may need the extra protection of SSL. Every Office Live Small Business account is already protected by a Microsoft Windows Live ID. SSL provides an extra layer of protection.
To learn how to turn SSL on or off, see also: Turn SSL on or off in Business Applications and Contact Manager.
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