Someone asked recently how Microsoft’s new, free OfficeLive web program for small businesses is working for me.
He could have never guessed what a nerve that question would strike!
After an enthusiastic start, and then a more cautious evaluation of the program — both topics of earlier SCBJ TechTalk columns — my experience has been so bad that it’s sent me scrambling to find alternatives. Yet I don’t have the time or the money to switch platforms. It’s been a rocky road.
I really think the OfficeLive project is the red-headed stepchild of someone in Redmond. For the most part its features aren’t business-friendly.
For one thing, Microsoft’s support staff doesn’t get the urgency when their product causes problems for my business. Their common answer is “we don’t support that” or “we’ll escalate that but we can’t tell you when to expect a response, much less a resolution. And we can’t give you a phone number for that department.”
If you do get an email response from that department, replies are blocked so you can’t even respond with questions to what you’re told.
With the incredible variety of tools out there I would think Microsoft would have forged some strong alliances with vendors that could provide robust solutions that would endear businesses to them and provide value. But, in my opinion, the OfficeLive product just doesn’t meet the needs of a business of any size.
Cool features, limited results
Yeah, it’s got some cool features. And it does build a nice Web site so long as you are willing to color within their lines. But you can get similar results from many template building tools on many of the discount hosting sites.
In times that are this difficult for businesses you would think they would be trying to add value to their product, not make it more difficult to use.
Here are a few examples of the problems I found with OfficeLive.
n Users can’t put javascript banner ads on the sites created in OfficeLive even though these banners are popular with affiliate sales channels. They’re also popular with most commercial Web site creators. But Microsoft’s OfficeLive software disables the code.
n Trying to add Google Analytics (the gold standard for tracking a Web site’s performance) causes the pages to crash. When pressed, their support staff will say “we don’t support third-party code.” There are some workarounds to be found in their support forums, but they are cumbersome at best and require some knowledge of HTML.
n I tried switching our mail over to them, but one of my employee accounts got dropped. They told me since it was deleted I couldn’t reactivate it for 130 days. No way to override it they said.
When pressed, they told me that all the site’s email is handled by Microsoft Hotmail and that’s a different division. They have no contact numbers or emails for Hotmail staff so they can’t do anything about it. There was no sympathy that I have an employee with hundreds of contacts that are now getting bounced emails and no understanding of the costs of printing new collateral or losing contact with prospects.
n I paid an employee for a month’s worth of work to enter hundreds of games into the OfficeLive online store package. We were planning to go live with it on April 1. It’s supposed to seamlessly integrate with eBay. It doesn’t. Then I got an email saying they’re discontinuing the e-commerce feature.
They gave a few recommendations for other providers, but setup fees and monthly charges apply that weren’t part of what I signed up for with OfficeLive.
Now, there is a lot of work that will have to be redone. Again, there was no no appreciation of the impact this would have on my business.
n Finally, there was a big problem with OfficeLive’s document sharing feature, the “big deal” that makes the program so special.
To make it work, however, I needed OfficeLive update software installed on my computer to make sharing work.
But, unlike Google, you have to have the application software (Microsoft Word, etc.) on the computer that accesses the shared workspaces.
Another problem cropped up because the software you have to download causes odd things to happen.
For instance, my laptop randomly pops us messages asking for my “network password;” Outlook throws out Sharepoint errors from time to time and Microsoft’s support crew doesn’t know what causes these issues.
Also, they don’t support Sharepoint, never mind that document sharing is a key feature and it’s installed with the “update” and refers me to my network administrator.
When I told one agent I was the network administrator she actually told me I would need to reformat my computer and start from scratch.
Enough said. You get the idea. I would strongly encourage anyone considering OfficeLive as a business tool to take my experiences into account when they evaluate their options.
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