Work from the airport (or the beach) using Office Live Small Business and Outlook
Microsoft Office Live Small Business gives you a comprehensive set of business tools to help you work effectively from one central, convenient online location. But nobody can be, or wants to be, online all the time. So, what do you do when you need to work while traveling (such as on an airplane or a train), or when you just want to take your laptop out of the office and work in the park or on a beach?
Using Microsoft Office Outlook, you can take your important business information with you and work seamlessly, even when you need to be offline. Take documents, e-mail, contacts, calendars, and much of your business application data with you, and keep it all synced with your Office Live Small Business account.
In this article
Manage your e-mail, calendar, and personal contacts
When you use Office Outlook to manage your Office Live Small Business e-mail accounts, you can access your mailboxes, personal calendars, and personal contacts whether or not you are online.
Use the free Microsoft Office Outlook Connector tool to add your Office Live Small Business e-mail accounts to Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007. The accounts that you add are automatically synced between Outlook and Office Live Small Business. This means that you always have the most current content whether you view accounts from Outlook or from Office Live Small Business.
When you access your Office Live Small Business e-mail accounts in Outlook, you also get the benefit of additional functionality, such as the ability to view two or more of your own calendars side-by-side , copy contacts from one contact list to another, or even compose e-mail messages while offline.
Download Microsoft Outlook Connector from the Microsoft Download Center. To learn more about using Outlook Connector to manage multiple Office Live Small Business e-mail accounts, see Microsoft Office Outlook Connector overview and Use e-mail to manage and grow your business.
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Do even more with Outlook 2007
Using Outlook 2007 with Office Live Small Business, you can take even more of your important business information with you wherever you go. Outlook 2007 has improved integration features that make it easy to work with your online data and documents even when you need to be offline. As described in the sections that follow, you can connect Contact Manager and much of your Business Applications data directly to Outlook.
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Access and manage business contacts
If Outlook 2007 is installed on the computer that you use to access Office Live Small Business, you can find the option to connect Contact Manager to Outlook on the Actions menu on the actions bar in Contact Manager. When you connect Contact Manager to Outlook 2007, your customer, vendor, partner, and other key business contact information is always on hand.
After you click Connect to Outlook, you see an Outlook message box prompting you to connect this SharePoint contacts list to Outlook. Your Contact Manager database (in addition to other Office Live Small Business lists and libraries discussed in this article) is designed to sync effortlessly with Outlook 2007.
After you connect Contact Manager to Outlook, you can access the Contact Manager list in Outlook by clicking Contacts on the Navigation Pane. Contact Manager appears in the Navigation Pane under the heading Other Contacts, and is separate from your personal contacts, as shown here.
Notes
- If you do not see the Navigation Pane in Outlook, on the View menu, point to Navigation Pane, and then click Normal.
- By default, changes that you make to Contact Manager information in Outlook are updated in your Office Live Small Business account the next time Outlook performs an automatic Send/Receive.
- If you do not already use the Contact Manager tools in your Office Live Small Business account, see Focus your sales and marketing efforts using Contact Manager to learn more about what you can do with Contact Manager.
- To determine whether the version of Outlook that you use is Outlook 2007, do the following: In Outlook, on the Help menu, click About Microsoft Office Outlook. The dialog box that opens indicates which version of Outlook you are using.
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Edit documents and lists
If you use the Business Applications in your Office Live Small Business account, you may already know that you can store and share documents using Document Manager or the document libraries in any workspace that you create. You can also use many of the available list-based applications, such as Time Manager or the Employee Directory. But, did you know that you can also take your documents and many of your lists with you when you need to work offline?
The Connect to Outlook option described earlier for use with Contact Manager and Outlook 2007 is also available to many Business Applications. When you connect a Business Application to Outlook 2007, it appears in one of the following locations:
- Applications that are contact-based, such as the Employee Directory, appear as separate contact lists in Outlook Contacts.
- Applications that are calendar-based, such as Time Manager, appear as available calendars in Outlook Calendars.
- Document or picture libraries, such as the Document Manager application or a document library that you add to a Team Workspace, appear in your Outlook Mail folders under the heading SharePoint Lists.
You can access the documents, contact items, or calendar items from each Office Live Small Business application that you connect with Outlook, whether or not you are online. By default, changes that you make to the items in your connected applications, either in Office Live Small Business or through Outlook, are updated in both locations the next time Outlook performs an automatic Send/Receive.
Notes
- When you save changes to an Office Live Small Business document in one of the 2007 Microsoft Office system programs, you are given the option to update the document on the server (that is, to update the original of the document in Office Live Small Business) when you exit the program.
- If you share the Document Manager application or any document library with other users of your Office Live Small Business account, you may want to check out a document before editing it offline, to avoid conflicting edits. To learn more about sharing documents, see Share files using a library.
- If your computer is running the Windows Vista operating system, note that document sync between Office Live Small Business and Outlook is still being developed in Windows Vista. You may have to temporarily save the documents that you connect to Outlook locally on your computer and then upload your changes to Office Live Small Business the next time you connect to the Internet.
- If you do not already use the Business Applications in your Office Live Small Business account, see Getting started with Business Applications to learn more about the many benefits of these dynamic tools.
For more information about how to connect your Business Applications and Contact Manager data with Outlook 2007, see Sync with Office Outlook 2007.
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Stay in sync no matter where life takes you
Is today the day that you step outside your office walls and work from your favorite scenic spot? You have all the tools you need to take your work wherever you want to be. Add contacts, manage calendars, edit documents, or compose e-mail messages.
Then, the next time you work online in Outlook, your e-mail messages will be sent, and your contacts, calendars, and documents will be updated automatically in Office Live Small Business.
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