Small-Biz Smarts
Office Live, slated for release in the fall, is designed for companies with fewer than ten people, which typically have no IT staff.
Most notably, Office Live lets you set up a company Web page with five e-mail accounts (at a domain name of your choosing) for free--so long as Microsoft can run business-relevant ads on the page (say, ads for office supplies, but not dating services).
The free Web page deal isn't unique: Yahoo has similarly offered free Web pages to small businesses since spring 2005. Like Microsoft, Yahoo provides design tools and business e-mail (although Microsoft's pages looked a bit more creative in the Office Live beta I tried). But Yahoo has hosting and e-commerce services, as well. Overall, it's too early to tell which giant's small-business services will be better, says Raymond Boggs, IDC's vice president for small-business research.
Ad-Free Options
An ad-free subscription-based alternative, Office Live Collaboration, offers 20 Web-based applications such as a sales activity tracker and project manager, plus access to collaboration features such as a password-protected Web site. A premium version, Office Live Essentials, will add a Web-based version of Front Page for site design, and up to 50 e-mail accounts.
Fees have yet to be set, but don't expect the type of beefy functionality you'd find in Intuit's QuickBooks or Sage's ACT contact manager. In my tests with the Office Live beta, I found that some of the applications are more like templates for organizing small-business data. For example, a "Competition Tracker" stores information about your rivals (number of employees, date founded, and so on). If you've been in business a while and already use a sophisticated contact or project manager, you may not find anything intriguing here.
Web-based programs certainly offer benefits: You can run the apps anywhere you have Web access, vendors take care of updates, and trying something new entails payment for only a month or two. You have to trust your data to Microsoft's servers, however, and you can export data only to Excel or Outlook.
Judging from what's available to date, Microsoft's Live initiative is unlikely to change computing as we know it anytime soon. In time, new applications may yet fulfill the promise of the Web to become the place where breakthrough software makes its debut. Whether it's from Microsoft remains to be seen.
Ad Choices