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Office Live Goes Live For Real on November 15: Microsoft
Published: November 1, 2006
by Alex Woodie
A collection of tools designed to help businesses quickly and easily set up a Web presence will become available on November 15, Microsoft announced yesterday. The beta test for Microsoft Office Live will end in two weeks, marking its general availability in the U.S. Meanwhile, the beta for Office Live in other countries is almost ready to begin.
Office Live is a collection of Web-based products, ranging from free to $40 per month, designed to help small businesses establish a Web presence, as well as attract new customers, generate repeat business, and manage their business online. There are three Office Live offerings, including Office Live Basics, Office Live Essentials, and Office Live Premium.
Office Live Basics (the free tool) will include a domain name, a hosted Web site with 500 MB of storage (up from 30 MB in the beta offering), 25 e-mail accounts with their own domain names (up from five in the beta), instant messaging software, support for calendaring through Office Live Mail, a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) Web site designer tool, Web site analytics to analyze the resulting traffic, and the Office Live adManager Beta.
Office Live Essentials, which will cost $19.95 per month, will add to the Basics offering with an additional 1GB of storage, support for up to 50 company-branded e-mail addresses, access to FrontPage for more advanced Web design, and Office Live Business Contact Manager, which is a collection of small business applications that helps people automate daily tasks, such as customer management, project management, and document management. The deal also calls for online "workspaces" for 10 users with 500 MB.
Office Live Premium (formerly Office Live Collaboration) will cost $39.95 per month, and provide users with everything in the Live Basics and Live Essentials, including: an additional 2 GB of Web site storage; 2 GB of storage for the 50 e-mail accounts, and support for 20 additional Office Live Business Contact Manager users and 1 GB of additional storage for the Workspaces. Like Office Live Essentials, this offering can be used on a stand-alone basis or hooked into a customer's existing Microsoft software.
Since the Office Live beta began in February, the software has been tested by more than 160,000 small businesses, Microsoft says. The feedback from these beta testers led to several new features, including ad management software, integration with Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007 (announced Monday), better Web tools and templates, more storage space, more e-mail accounts, and capability to chat online via text, voice, or mobile phone using Windows Live Messenger.
To download the betas while they're still betas, visit www.officelive.com.
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