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Office Live Beta Puts SOHOs Online: Page 5 of 7

  • The Employee application is a lot less robust. Its core component, which stores employee facts such as name and title, is reasonably useful, but the Training, Expense reporting, and Working Hours components are so underpowered or bafflingly tedious that I can’t recommend them. For example, Training keeps track of training classes and who enrolled, but not who completed them, so it’s not very useful in the real world.
  • The Calendar application lets you display a company calendar and an overview of data from Business Applications — a list of project milestones, for example. Because there is no integration between the calendar and the Project information, dates from the applications (such as milestone due dates) don’t flow to the calendar, which reduces its usefulness considerably.

    Essentials comes with a license for 10 users; you can buy additional five-packs. Storage space is limited to 50MB. Security is limited: You can assign a user to be an Administrator (to set up other accounts), Editor (to view and update information), or Reader (viewing rights only) — but only for all Business Applications as a whole.

    By accessing applications online rather than running from your hard drive, you’re likely to experience slight delays between the time you press the Enter key and when your screen is refreshed. That’s the trade-off of using software as a service. The big benefit: Updated information is immediately available to your co-workers.

    Shared Sites Stumbles
    Besides sharing data among your co-workers, Office Live includes a tool called Shared Sites that lets you share key information with customers or partners (in the same way that an extranet does). A Shared Site can let you view a document library and limited business information such as project status; the portal-like view makes organization and navigation easy.



    Click image to enlarge.