Microsoft's Other Office is Worth a Look Sharing Info with Others and Pricing Details Jamie Bsales
Step Three: Share the Info with Others
If Office Live had stopped there, there would be enough to keep most business owners happy. But Microsoft has also added basic – but useful – online storage and collaboration tools. The Shared Sites area lets you store and share information and documents with coworkers, vendors, and customers.
Shared Sites essentially repeats many of the apps found in the Business Applications area, but here they are accessible to outsiders (with permissions set by you). There's a Customer Workspace area, Projects area, and a Document Library where you can upload files. Unfortunately, the apps here don't share data with those found in your main Business Applications area. If you want to share the status of a project you're tracking with a customer, be sure to build it in the Shared Sites area; if you build it in your private Business Applications area and later want to make it public, you have to rebuild it.
And E-mail, Too
One area that we found less integrated than we would have liked (at least in this beta stage) is the Web-based e-mail application, called Microsoft Office Live Mail. You and your employees each get an e-mail account (yourname@yourbusinessname.com, not some less-professional looking Hotmail address) with 2GB of storage each.
Unfortunately, clicking on the Inbox from the Office Live main page pops you into a whole new user interface. The top-level navigation pane on the left disappears, and to get back to Office Live, you need to click on the text link at the bottom of the page. Worse, contacts you entered into Office Live do not automatically appear in Live Mail, nor do Office Live calendar entries propagate to the Calendar found in Live Mail.
Plans and Pricing
Microsoft offers three levels of service under the Office Live umbrella. All are free during the beta period, but that will change for the top two tiers when the service officially launches late this year.
Office Live Basics gives you free Web hosting for sites up to 30MB in size. You can upload and download up to 10GB a month of stored and shared documents, and you get up to five e-mail accounts (2GB of storage each, with an attachments size limit of 10MB), but you don't get the more than 20 business tools. This service will remain free after the beta period ends, but you'll need to put up with some online ads (they won't appear on your public-facing Web site, just on the pages you visit to access Office Live).
Office Live Essentials ($29.95 per month after the beta period ends) gives you the business tools and is ad-free. You also get higher storage limits and up to 50 e-mail accounts, and you can add users and storage space as needed for an incremental monthly fee.
Office Live Collaboration ($29.95 per month) is the right choice for businesses that already have a hosted Web site, but want access to the service's online workspace and business-management tools.
Those are certainly reasonable prices for all that Office Live delivers. So if you've been thinking you should leverage the Web to expand or manage your business, now is the time to try it. During the free beta period, you only have to invest your time.
Jamie Bsales is an award-winning technology writer and editor with nearly 14 years of experience covering the latest hardware, software and Internet products and services.
