Until recently, Office Live’s big claim to fame was that it was one of the very few places left on the Web where you could set up a Web site and have it hosted for free. Not only that, but it was virtually the only site where you could obtain a domain name (such as mywebbusiness.com) for free.
In case this sounds too good to be true, you were right. The free aspects of Office Live have been scaled back a bit. Now, you can get a domain name and e-mail free for a year, with Office Live Small Business (the new name for
the business management version of Office Live) but after that, you have to pay a $14.95 annual fee. Since other Web hosts charge about the same for a domain name and e-mail service, you have to ask what other advantages Office Live gives you. There are advantages, and luckily for you home office workers, they’re perfect if you already use Office and you need to share files and schedules with other home-based professionals or with those who are still stuck in traditional offices.
Office Live comes in two versions: Office Live Workspace (http://workspace.officelive.com/) and Office Live Small Business (http://smallbusiness.officelive.com/). Workspace (shown below) is a free work area you can use to post documents so clients or coworkers can preview them. By installing a free plug in, you can edit the documents with your Office software. Use it if you’re primarily interested in accessing your files online and giving others password-controlled access to them.
Office Live Small Business is oriented toward small business owners who need to create a Web site, get e-mail service, and manage customer contacts. If you work from home and you don’t want to hire a designer to create your site, and you don’t yet have your own customer relationship management (CRM) software, Office Live can provide it for you.
Other advantages:
- If you already have a Windows Live ID, you can sign in to either of these services for free, right now.
- If you use Office Live Small Business (shown in the second image, below), you get to use contact manager software that gives you a place to store contact information for your clients and other colleagues.
- You get access to Web site creation software so you don’t have to start spinning Web pages from scratch.
You might well ask: why should I pay $14.95 for year (after the first free year) to use Office Live Small Business, when I can use other productivity tools like Google Docs and Zoho? Good question. If you’re a committed Office user and, like me, you “live” inside Word and other Microsoft tools, you will find Office Live particularly user friendly. I’ll be exploring aspects of the Office Live tools in subsequent articles so you can learn how they can streamline the process of working at home.