Office Live: Microsoft's Ambitious Online Suite Makes Its Official Debut Getting Started with Office Live Jamie Bsales
Getting Started
Setting up an Office Live account is easy. You'll be prompted to enter a password and your preferred Website name. The service then checks to see if that URL is available; if it's already taken, it offers similar alternatives that aren't. Once you land a URL, you can pick your e-mail address and enter other business information.
Subsequent visits bring you to a clean login screen (reminiscent of the Windows XP login screen). Enter your password, and you are ready to start working. At the top of the Office Live home page is a box titled "Get started on Office Live," with links to relevant articles for newcomers, including five steps to get started (adding users and setting permissions, setting up e-mail for your organization, building your Website, submitting your site to search engines, and working with the Business Applications and Workspaces).
That box also contains links to a Website overview, getting started with e-mail, business applications overview and a download link to Office Accounting Express 2007, Microsoft's recent free online accounting program for small business
If you actually read the manual before delving into a product, this area is for you. The rest of us will jump right into the boxes dedicated to each area of the service: E-mail, Website, Business Applications, and Workspaces (where you store, manage, and share information with others). If you need help, the Resource Center box offers help. Microsoft has done a good job with this top-level user interface, letting you pick which areas to delve into first.
Working with E-mail
Probably the most-used portion of Office Live will be the e-mail module. Clicking on the e-mail tab on the home page pops up an MSN HotMail login, where you need to re-enter your e-mail address and password. The look of this screen is different from the rest of Office Live, and it's somewhat annoying to have to log in again. But past this login screen, the Office Live interface returns.
The mail app resembles Outlook (a good thing), with folders listed on the far left, message headers in a column to the right of that, and the reading pane to display the selected message occupying the rest of the screen. An options button lets you tweak this view to have the reading pane below the message list or to remove it entirely (meaning you'll need to open a message to see its contents).
Also like Outlook, well-marked icons above the message list let you create, reply, forward, delete and print messages with a click. In creating a message, you can change the font style and size, create numbered or bulleted lists, highlight text, spell check and add emoticons. Office Live is more powerful in this regard than other Webmail products and much more like desktop Outlook.
If you are set on using Outlook proper as your mail interface, you can download Outlook Connector, which, if you have Outlook 2002 or better, lets you access and manage Office Live Mail accounts via the desktop app. A handy wizard (accessible via the Options link in the upper right of the contacts page) purports to let you import all or selected contacts (up to 992 of them) from Outlook or Outlook Express to Office Live, but this feature was not yet working in the week following the service's launch (Microsoft reported it was having server issues).
We ran into a few other issues, as well. To add an e-mail's recipients to your contact list, you need to click on that name from the list you are presented with after you hit send, rather than a more intuitive "add recipients to contact list" button in the compose pane. (And again, when we tried it, we received an error message). If you want sent messages to be saved, be sure to click the "Save sent messages" link the first time you compose a message — by default, they are not saved.
Finally, the 'Move to" button lets you move a message to the default Junk Mail, Drafts, Sent or Deleted Items folders; it does not offer the choice of adding a new folder — a drawback if you're obsessed with categorizing their e-mail.
Web Site Design
Office Live's second big selling point is its ability to get any business online quickly, with minimum fuss. To get started, click on the Design Site link in the Website panel, which takes you to a Page Manager view that shows a list of your site's pages. By default, Office Live sets up an About Us, Contact Us, Home, and Site Map pages. Click on the Edit link to launch the design tool and make your changes.
The two-tab designer, one labeled Page Editor and the other Site Designer, lets you start playing without any training. In the Page Editor tab, you type or cut-and-paste desired text, and then choose your desired fonts and colors, add images, and even pop on handy "modules" (such as a "contact us" link, directions, slideshow, the local weather) to make your site more useful to visitors.
The Site Designer tab lets you choose your site's theme from a range of industries (advertising and marketing, clothing and fashion, food and beverage, real estate and 21 others) and layout style (more than 20 choices) and color scheme (more than 30). Clicking on the choices in any of these areas instantly applies the change to your site. If you like it, hit save; if not, pick another.
Considering how easy the tool is to use, most people should be satisfied with the results. There are enough options (150,000 in all) that you can personalize and distinguish your site. The designer is clearly aimed at site-building novices, not full-fledged Web developers; so don't expect to be creating eye-popping graphics or Flash animations within it. If you subscribe to Office Live Essentials or Premium, you can import an existing site into Office Live (this feature wasn't available in the public beta version of the service).
Office Live also now offers full e-commerce support — another feature not previously available in the beta version. You can have a shopping cart and take credit card and PayPal payments. And you can tie transactions into the Office Accounting Express module.
More importantly, Office Live will help people find your site on the Web. The Resource Center has articles that help you determine if the major search engines have indexed your site, and if they haven't, it has articles that teach you how to do so. An even more proactive approach is the new Office Live adManager tool. With adManager, you can buy relevant keywords from the major search engines. Referred to as search engine optimization, this helps to drive targeted traffic to your site.
Informative site reports let you see what's working on your site and which areas need improvement. For example, you can see the number of site visits, page views and unique visitors. Search engine reports show you the search engines and keywords that are driving traffic to your site.
