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Office Tweaks

Office Live Experience

by Jason on March 19th, 2006

I recently used an Office Live Beta invite that I had and tested out the waters. I’ve been playing around with it now for about a week. The experience has been pretty good so far, and I setup and registered for a free domain and hosting package. I’ve been pleased with the features I’ve seen so far and used. The simple fact that a small business could register a domain and get free hosting is a great asset to them.

The full features of the subscription option I chose are:

  • A company domain name
  • A hosted Web site with 30MB of storage
  • Five free e-mail accounts with 2GB of storage each
  • Basic Web analysis tools

My biggest beef so far is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to access the site with a 3rd party web development tool like Dreamweaver. This makes a little bit of sense though as then Microsoft would just be giving away a free domain name and hosting, and not really promoting their soups-to-nuts service. It almost seems to be replacing the basic functionality of Frontpage and combining it with the functionality of Sharepoint services.
The other item is that the free package doesn’t offer much more features than your standard online webpage authoring site. I will say that a nice feature is the integrated e-mail though. This alone makes it very easy for a company to have easy to use e-mail functionality that is web-based and accessible from any internet connection. It amazes me the number of small businesses that have @aol.com or @whatever.com e-mail on their business cards. Even if you don’t want a full-blown website, the cost of domain name and e-mail functionality is so cheap, and worth the impression it provides over an @aol.com or other ISP provided e-mail address.

If anyone would like to try out the Office Live beta, just leave a comment. I’ve got one product key available to someone if they want to use it. Thanks to Jesse.

UPDATE–The free product key has been given away! Thanks everyone!

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POSTED IN: FrontPage, General, Microsoft, Office Live

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