Office Live a great resource for small businesses

Published 12:44 pm Thursday, October 30, 2008

In earlier columns we told you about the move being made towards providing software on demand. We also gave you the names of some programs that help small business run like a big business without needing a big business budget.

Among those, we referred to Microsoft’s Office Live offering. We have been experimenting with Office Live and have found it to be an outstanding resource for small businesses. There are some issues to overcome, but these issues don’t diminish the overall usefulness and usability of the site.

When you sign up for Microsoft Office Live Small Business, you receive a Web site, Web hosting and Web design tools, site traffic reports, a contact management system, and online business applications to help you manage your business —all for free (registering your own domain name is free for the first year, then $14,95 per year after that).

It took less than 10 minutes to sign up for an Office Live account. We set up a new domain directly through the home page of the administrator’s interface. It was ready to receive traffic in just a couple of hours. That was just enough time to use the site’s user-friendly Web design tool to create a professional looking Web site (www.byteslavesinc.com).

If you already have a domain name it can be redirected to the Office Live account. Office Live offers “modules” that allows users to insert content like a blog, calendar of events, a stock ticker, custom HTML and more. Advanced users can even edit Search Engine Optimization (SEO) settings.

Office Live allows you to set up as many as five users and up to 100 email accounts (with domain registration, see above) without additional charge. You can add modules and services, such as online sales (complete with shopping cart and PayPal Merchant account) for a monthly fee.

The Contact Manager allows you to create contacts or import them from an Excel Spreadsheet or Outlook 2003 or 2007. The contacts can be organized into groups such as prospect, vendor or anything else you can imagine. They can even be assigned to team members.

Office Live offers a hefty set of Business Applications the site’s users can access. There are way too many to list them in this column, but here are a few of our favorites:

Document Manager. Upload documents and pictures to Office Live that can be shared and updated by team members. Optional settings to create versions as files are changed and require users to check out files if desired. This application is a little cumbersome in that you can only upload one file at a time (the help file indicates multiple files can be uploaded if you have Office 2003 or 2007, but we could not access this feature).

Team Workspace. This application allows team members to share documents as they do with the Document Manager, but Team Manager also has options for tasks, links to information, announcements, team discussion and more. Team Workspaces can be set up for specific project or departments. The information in any of these fields can even be published on the Web site.

Customer Support. We really liked this one. Track service requests; create FAQs and a knowledge base. These resources can be used internally and, if desired, posted on the Web site.

Office Live isn’t perfect, though. User permissions were a bit flawed in our opinion. By default, a user’s permission to access applications is set to No Access. Once permission to access a Business Application is given, it cannot be denied at a later time. There are three access options for a user: Administrator, Editor and Reader. You cannot revert back to No Access without deleting and recreating the user account. This could present a problem if an employee is transferred to a new position. While this isn’t a major bug, we hope Microsoft will address this issue in future releases.

Unlike Google Apps, Office Live does not provide you with tools to create documents and presentations directly on the Web site. Users of some versions must have Microsoft Office installed on their computer in order to be able to create, edit and share documents.

Finally, when setting up an online store your only option for accepting payments through the Web site is to create a PayPal account. You have two options at that point: PayPal Express and PayPal Credit Card Direct. Both charge a percentage of the sale price plus a flat transaction fee. The difference between the two is that PayPal Express routes the visitor to the PayPal site to enter credit card information but not impose a monthly fee. The Credit Card Direct adds a monthly fee. In our opinion these fees are higher than the going rate. We were unable to find a way to integrate our existing online merchant account.

There are many more features available through this product – online newsletter management, advertising, reporting and automate alerts for almost anything. To fully appreciate the power of this suite of applications and how it can work with your business I encourage you to sign up for a free account and give it a try. We encourage you to send us your impressions through the site we created with Office Live – www.byteslavesinc.com.

Sven Mogelgaard is the owner of Mill Creek-based Byte Slaves Inc. (www.byteslaves.com) and can be reached by calling 425-482-9529. Will Rutherford is the owner of Bothell-based Computer Concepts (www.conceptsnet.com) and can be reached by calling 425-481-3666.