Last Thursday we had the honor of presenting to the Microsoft Office Developer Conference about the plans for the next version of Office Live. The conference is generally a gathering of developers focused on Enterprise-sized businesses. Even though Office Live is targeted towards Small Businesses, the conference was a great opportunity to get the word out about the developer story for an upcoming release.

 

In our current 1.0 Beta release, the “private” password-protected Shared Sites that are part of our Essentials offering include a variety of preconfigured applications such as contact management, project tracking and human resources. We’ve kept these locked down from significant customization in anticipation of moving to Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) v3.  For example, you could not use FrontPage 2003 against the 1.0 collaboration sites.

 

In future versions, we are planning to allow SharePoint Designer (the next release of Front Page) to work on collaboration sites. SharePoint Designer has some really incredible new tools for managing styles, conditional formatting of cells in a list and a data viewer control to aggregate data from just about any data source.

 

In addition to the new SharePoint Designer functionality, WSS v3 also has a lot of richness that Office Live will enable.  Features such Wikis, Blogs and Web Discussions will give customers many new ways to collaborate. Solution Developers can customize and integrate these features to the needs of their customers.

 

Better integration with Microsoft Office Access gives Office Developers powerful ways to leverage their existing skills.  Access has a great new capability to take SharePoint data “offline” with you, work on it, and sync changes back to SharePoint later with conflict management. Now, you can envision scenarios where a small businessperson can to take their Office Live data offline in Access, work in the plane in the rich UI constructed by an Office Live Solution Developer, and when they get to their destination, sync the data back up to Office Live, without missing a beat.

 

All this new functionality augments Office Live’s core strengths of providing a roaming collaboration environment without the pains of buying hardware or maintaining software. We’re obviously really excited about these changes, and hope to bring you more information as the plans for the next releases of Office Live fall into place.

 

One of the most important decisions you’ll need to make when signing up for Microsoft Office Live Basics or Essentials is picking your company’s domain name.  Many customers already have their domain name, and they can quickly transfer that name to Office Live.  In a future posting I may go into how this transfer works and answer some common questions, so if that is what you’re most concerned about let me know…. The more ‘votes’ I get the more likely I am to write about it!

 

But for today let’s talk about picking a domain name for the first time.  It seems like a minor decision but it actually is very important for your business and the success of your online ventures with Office Live.   Once you pick your domain you can’t easily change it (you can of course sign up for a whole different domain but that would mean creating an entire new account!)  Your domain-name choice is about deciding on your company’s online presence.  In many cases this can be very easy; you pick the domain name which matches your business name.  Often this is a very good choice; it helps people find you online who already know your business ‘offline’.  But sometimes this doesn’t help new customers find you and can even make it harder for them to know who you are and what you do. 

 

Take a hypothetical company named ‘XYZ Inc.’ as an events-planning company.  They could go with an easy choice of ‘XYZInc.com’.  This might be a great choice for current customers to find them online.  However that name is more unlikely to resonate with potential customers searching online.  A name more like ‘XYZ-Event-Planning.com’ or even just ‘Event-Planning.com’ has more meaning to a potential customer.  The domain name itself includes a reference to what the business has to offer.

 

Sometimes the domain name you might want to use is already taken.  This is a common issue for businesses creating an online presence from scratch.  You might try the .net or .org version (XYZInc.org or EventPlanning.net) if they could work for you.  The key to working through this issue is to have a few ideas in mind.  Pick a few names and then work through the set.  The more time you spend up-front coming up with the right names the more likely you are to be happy with your final choice!

 

Hopefully this has helped you out a little with one of the first big decisions to be made in starting your business’s online presence with Office Live.  As always, please keep the feedback coming and send questions to Matthew.Rolak@Microsoft.com.  I will try to answer as many questions, concerns, and e-mails as possible.

 

Hello and greetings from Quality Assurance. My name is Matt Rolak and I work on the QA team for Microsoft Office Live. The QA team are the testers; we're the ones trying to break the product so you don't have to :). We also try to put ourselves in the proverbial 'shoes' of our customers and try to use the product from their perspective. What this usually means is we have a very different perspective on the product from the designers or coders... and I plan to share some of that perspective with all of you.

This first posting from me is really just an introduction. In future postings I plan to go through some areas of Microsoft Office Live. I'll highlight some areas which have had lots of questions. I also hope to give some walk-throughs and answer any of your questions. But to answer your questions I have to know them first ;-) So, if you've got a question about our product drop me an email at Matthew.Rolak@microsoft.com. I can't promise I'll answer every question but I'll do my best to answer some, either directly via email or from postings to this blog.  For my next posting I’ll talk a little about domains and their role in our signup process.

So, hello and good-bye for now. I hope to hear from you all soon but in the meantime enjoy our Beta and good luck bringing your business Online!