Office Live Beta Puts SOHOs Online
Posted by
Rick Scott
February 22, 2006
You can use your own images (such as a logo) after importing them to an Image Library. The Basics version allows you to store 30MB of text and graphics for your site (for Essentials that jumps to 50MB). Additional storage can be purchased in 50MB increments. Bandwidth is a respectable 10GB/month (Basics) or 25GB/month (Essentials); you can purchase an additional 25GB/month blocks.
Not having to deal with DNS settings and FTP programs to update a site should come as a big relief to small business owners. While many Web-building applications make it as easy as possible for novices to build a site and get it online, Office Live takes care of everything, from the domain name registration to the Web design. Just click some buttons, edit some text, and watch it magically appear on line.
Coupled with a feature that offers daily backup (and easy restore) and an extensive array of activity reports (such as number of visitors and top pages visited), Office Live Basics and Essentials offer a simple turnkey solution for building a small business Web site. You certainly can’t beat the price.
The Basics version includes five e-mail accounts for your chosen domain; messages are read and created from (what else?) Hotmail. Attachments are limited to 10MB, and you can store up to 2GB of messages. With Essentials you get 50 e-mail accounts: attachments can be as large as 20MB, and you can access a mailbox from Hotmail, Outlook, and Outlook Express. Extra groups of five e-mail accounts can be purchased for either version; Collaboration offers no e-mail accounts.
Essentials: Collaboration Is Key
Essentials includes all the Web-building tools of Basics, then adds a collection of tools called Business Applications, including Contact Manager, Sales, Projects, Employee, and Calendar. These tools help you track companies and customers, manage project deadlines, store sales information, manage key employee data, and build a company calendar of events. Some information is shared among the applications — you can assign a customer to a project or assign a task to-do list item to an employee. (The Collaboration version includes the same Business Applications collection.)
The applications are extensively customizable. For example, the Customer Manager is perfectly adequate as is, but you can add your own fields, rearrange the field order on the data entry screen, select which data you wanted to see (and save those custom views for repeated viewing), and view or edit data one record at a time or in a columnar grid. The applications provide a one-way data exchange with Office applications: You can export data to Excel or Access, build a Pivot Table report, or create a chart in Excel. Sadly, there’s no import feature.
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