Office Live: Microsoft's Ambitious Online Suite Makes Its Official Debut Business Apps and Collaboration Spaces Jamie Bsales
Business Applications
Office Live's third push (for Essentials and Premium subscribers) is its suite of online applications designed to help you run your business more efficiently.
Foremost among them is the Business Contact Manager. Once you've landed customers or interested parties through your site, BCM helps you retain them. Essentially a bare-bones CRM program, the module lets you track prospects, follow-up tasks, and more. You can use BCM to manage marketing and sales tasks (to keep the leads coming) and customer care. For example, you can set an alert that will remind you to follow up with a given individual at a future time, to keep possible sales from getting lost in the shuffle.
A Time Manager module in the Business Applications area lets you set up a shared online calendar for your employees, track schedules, among other tasks. A Project Manager module lets you set up and assign tasks for several projects and track the progress of each at a glance.
The handy Document Management center gives you a central repository (accessible to all your employees wherever they happen to be) for your business documents. You can of course set permissions for documents, so only certain individuals can access a document or make changes. You can also use this space as storage for images (company logos, photos for printed materials and for the Web site) that several people may need access to.
Granted, none of these are best-of-breed products. But the fact that they are gathered in one workspace and accessible through the same login you use for your e-mail makes them more convenient than standalone desktop or online apps — and increases the likelihood that you'll actually use them.
Microsoft designed Office Live as an open platform, and the company reports that 75 partners are currently developing add-ons to deliver niche tools to extend Office Live's functionality. You can expect to see tools tailored to restaurant owners, non-profit groups and other industries in the coming year.
Collaboration Spaces
Office Live also offers a venue for people inside and outside your company to collaborate online. The Workspaces module delivers a Team Workspace area where team members can post announcements, calendar items, important links, and shared documents.
The Basic Meeting Workspace helps you plan and organize meetings and capture outcomes and action-items in a central place. When a team member sets a meeting, he or she can enter the meeting's objectives, agenda and invitees, and then post any relevant documents (a PowerPoint presentation, for example) attendees might need for the meeting. A Wiki Workspace gives staff a way to quickly post ideas, links, or items of interest for all to see, without having to build a full-blown Website.
An outward-facing Customer Workspace module lets you share information, calendar items, links and shared documents with clients or other people outside of your organization. This can serve as a handy way to keep a client in the loop about the status of a project, without the need for a daily e-mail update as many client-centered businesses do now.
Overall
Microsoft Office Live has a lot going for it, namely its one-stop-shopping approach and unified interface. It isn't as strong as other online services in internal- and client-facing collaboration (HyperOffice has it beat here) or CRM (SageCRM.com and Salesnet.com offer better solutions). But it is a good start for small business owners just establishing a presence on the Web and who want to provide e-mail to employees without the cost of an in-house server-based setup.
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.
