Office Live Beta Puts SOHOs Online
Posted by
Rick Scott
February 22, 2006
Building a Shared Site is confusing at first. That’s because while you can add a Project Web Part to a Shared Site, these aren’t the same Web Parts as from the Business Application’s Project application. Shared Sites use completely separate databases. Also, if you use a Shared Site to create a document library and include the same Word file in two such Sites, the file counts double toward your 50MB space limit. Worse, every customer or vendor you share a site with counts toward your 10-user initial allotment.
Shared Sites are fine for document libraries, but the feature's lack of integration with the Business Applications means double-data entry, and that precludes their usefulness.
Step Lively
Office Live lives up to many of its promises. The Basics and Essentials versions let small business owners build a no-frills, no-cost Web site that looks good and doesn’t take a geek, Web consultant, or relative to get up and running. The Essentials and Collaboration versions make it possible to share key customer and company information among your co-workers using a decent set of productivity applications that don’t try to do too much, and a rudimentary tool (Shared Sites) for providing data online for select customers, vendors, or partners
You can sign up for the beta, but you’ll need to wait in line for an invitation. Microsoft says they're rolling out the applications out in a controlled fashion in order to make sure the system capacity isn’t overtaxed. That makes sense to me. You’ll be asked to provide your credit card; according to Microsoft, this is "in order to validate that every customer is a legitimate entity." However, the company goes on to assure users that, when the beta test period is over, they will be asked for explicit permission to begin charging.
Office Live offers everything that a novice Web builder needs in one place, with a simple interface, no technical details to master, and relatively good performance, so that you can get good results for very little effort and a very small learning curve. It cannot, of course, be judged against more sophisticated Web packages, and isn't appropriate for those who are looking to build complex sites; for example, it doesn't have forms or any type of e-commerce features (according to Microsoft, e-commerce support is planned for a release later in the year, but no details were available.)
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