Chris did a great job introducing you to the Shared Sites and Business Applications that come as part of the Essentials offer (take note, they also come with the Collaboration offer).  I'm going to write some "drill down deeper" posts to hopefully answer all the questions so far and to get some things off my chest about what the heck we were thinking!  Most importantly, I hope that we can entice all of you who are Essentials subscribers to give the Business Applications a try and make them what you want them to be so you can run your business efficiently.
 
Why so many Business Applications?

At first glance you might think there are a lot of Business Applications and you aren't sure where to start.  A lot of research was done to determine what kinds of applications Small Businesses need to run their businesses.  Microsoft has an entire division focused just on determining those needs so we leveraged all of that plus our own research and came up with the Business Applications that you see today.

 

It turns out, there are a lot of different types of businesses out there that have a lot of needs, so we wanted to do our best to get a good baseline.  Secondly, don't look at the applications and try to conform to them, start by thinking about what your needs are in order to run your business and then see if the Business Applications meet your needs.  If you don't see an application that does the job, then simply update an existing one or create a brand new one (its easy, I'll get more into that in a future post).

 

All of the Business Applications live in one subweb- we did this to take advantage of the Windows SharePoint Services “Lookup” data field to integrate them together.  I read some feedback where a customer wanted to give an employee permission to Project Manager but not Contact Manager and they couldn't do it. Yes, that's true, if you give permissions to someone to use the Business Applications, they can use all of them.  If the Business Applications were in separate subwebs then they couldn't integrate and we thought that was more important than application level permissions.  This is a limitation for the beta version but we are working very hard to improve that experience in a future version.

 

If it’s important to limit the number of eyeballs on certain data, then I recommend using a Shared Site. Shared Sites are like virtual workspaces - if you want to collaborate with just a few people on a project, idea or just share documents, then set up a Shared Site or use an existing one such as "Customer Workspace" and invite others to use it.  You'll notice that we created an "Human Resources" workspace - that was to help customers that needed to limit any confidential information from employees that had access to the Business Applications.  Lastly, if you don't like any of the pre-canned Shared Sites that we created, make your own! We included some templates for you, but you can upload an .STP file (Windows SharePoint Services Template file) or modify an existing Shared Site.

 

I hope that I helped to answer some questions out there. I will definitely continue drilling down deeper into the Business Applications and Shared Sites to help everyone mold them into what they need to run their business efficiently.  If you aren’t currently an Office Live subscriber and this piqued your interest, please sign up for a free subscription to Office Live Beta before time runs out!

 

Until next time!

 

-Tara, Lead Program Manager 

With many customers now using Office Live, it’s time to create a space that will enable the community to form and flourish…and this is it! Check out the Office Live Community home page at OfficeLiveCommunity.com. For now, we’ve created two message boards: "Get started with Microsoft Office Live" and "Share your feedback about Microsoft Office Live." Use the first message board to post general questions about using our product. The second message board is intended as an avenue for you to share your experiences about using Office Live: tell us what you like about it, what you don’t and what we can do to make it better.

 

Folks on our team have seeded the message boards with some frequently asked customer questions. We hope that you will find these useful in addressing any problems that you might currently be facing.

 

Ready to post? You will need to sign in with a Microsoft Passport account in order to post to the message boards. If you have an existing Office Live account, you can use those credentials to sign in. If you don’t have an Office Live account, you can use sign in with any valid Passport account. Once you are signed in, set your display name (you only need to set this once), type in your message and click "Post."

 

We’ll be monitoring the message boards and will try our best to answer the questions that you post. Nevertheless, we also want to give you an opportunity to connect with other Office Live subscribers and share your experiences. We hope that you will find this forum informative and useful.

 

Happy posting!

 

Until now, we have not allowed reader comments on this blog. We really want to hear from you, but we all have day jobs, and didn’t want to spend time “policing” comments for profanity, spam, or other abuse.
 
We’re going to turn reader comments on now. If all goes well, we’ll leave it turned on permanently.

 

Some basic rules, so that everyone plays nice: Reader comments are welcome, even (especially) those that disagree with us. However, comments may be deleted for profanity, threats, harassment, spam, or other forms of abuse.

 

To kick this off, why not tell us your favorite idea for improving Office Live? Just click the link below, and add your comments.

 

Office Live 1.0 Beta has been out there for a couple months so far, and I don’t think I’d be telling any secrets that our Basics package has been the run-away hit.  Who can say no to “Free”, especially when that comes with a domain name & website?

 

Office Live Essentials, however, gives you the same basic domain and website, but adds a lot of great features for helping your business take advantages of the efficiencies of the internet.  Efficiencies?  I hear the cynics grumbling about that word right now!  If you’ve seen how simple Office Live Basics makes getting a website up and running for your company, maybe its time to see how Office Live Essentials can get your business quickly collaborating with remote offices, work-from-home employees, vendors, partners, and of course, customers.

 

The core of Essentials is the Business Applications and Shared Sites.  Essentials provides a variety of applications under Business Applications that most small businesses need.  Contact Manager, for example, allows you to create accounts, assign them to specific employees, and associate contacts to the account.  By categorizing the accounts by territory or rating, you can keep a close eye on your business, even when the employee managing the accounts works from home in Topeka and you are in Des Moines.

 

Project Manager is another great tool for collaborating with people from many different geographies.  Enter the projects, milestones, tasks and issues, and track them no matter where you are.  You’ve always got your finger on the pulse of the projects, with views that show projects that are overdue or completed.

Other examples of BizApps (as we call them internally) are Sales Campaigns, Competition Tracker, Collateral, Estimates, Employee Directory, Expenses, Work Hours, Calendars and many more.

 

Since Office Live 1.0 is built on top of the Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) platform, you can also customize the business applications or create your own new apps if you don’t find what you want.  Just click on Shared Sites and go to the Site Manager.  Here you can either create new applications based on templates we provide, or upload a WSS template if you already have a SharePoint app that you want to reuse.

 

Don’t take my word for it.  Essentials is free while we’re in Beta, but it won’t be forever, so try it now at no risk, while you can.

 

I thought this week’s posting would be a good time to share all the questions I’ve gotten so far with the rest of the blog.  Many of you have dropped me an email with some very valid questions, and in most cases the same question has come from multiple people!  I’ve passed on the bulk of these questions to the owners of our site content around help and frequently asked questions so over the next few weeks I’d expect some of these questions will ‘go away’ as the information will be more publicly available.   But in the meantime keep sending me questions, I’m trying to respond directly within at least 3 days (sometimes the weekend does keep me away from the computer though).  If I’ve not responded to your question yet I should soon… and you are more than welcome to ask again, just drop me a mail at Matthew.Rolak@Microsoft.com.

But, for now I bring you the first installment of ‘Customer Questions’

 

Question: I just created an email address with my Office Live account but I can’t see it/get to it/find it? 
Answer: This is just about our most common question right now, how do I get to the mailbox I just created?!?  There are a variety of ways you can get there but first there is something fundamental to understand.  When you create a new mailbox with you Basics or Essentials subscription you’ve also just added that account as a user of Office Live!  So, you can take that email address and password you just created and log in to www.officelive.com with that address.  Once in you will see an Email section complete with a link to the Inbox for that email address.

 

Or, you can go straight to the inbox by logging in at Hotmail.com with that account.  All our mailboxes are also valid Hotmail.com mailboxes.

 

Bonus tip: You can also add that user/address to your Web Site or Shared Sites.  If you add them as a user on those areas, on their next login they will have the ability to say edit the web site, or add information to your shared sites.

 

Question: When I log in to Office Live I don’t even see any link for an ‘inbox’ but I created one for me, what’s going on?
Answer: If you signed up for Office Live with a pre-existing passport (say against your Comcast.net or yahoo.com email account) then you’ll not see a link to your inbox because we didn’t create it ;-)  Since you came to us and signed up as the owner with a pre-existing non-Hotmail email address we can’t give you a new ‘inbox’ link with that address. Most often I’ve had a follow-up question that customers understood this first part but then wanted to have a ‘created’ inbox get associated with that owner Passport.  Today we don’t support the ability to have the owner’s login point inside Office Live to some other inbox created with the Email features of Office Live.  I realize this might be a bit confusing and we are planning some help updates to make this clearer in our product today.  Basically though, if you created a new email address at your new site, say Matt@MyNewOfficeLiveSite.com, then to see that inbox you’ll need to login to OfficeLive.com with that address (as described in the question above)

 

Question: How do I access my Office Live mailbox with my mobile device?
Answer: If you are using Windows Mobile devices, you should have Pocket Outlook support Hotmail accounts. If you are using non-Windows Mobile devices, you need to run MSN Mobile to get email alert. Check out: http://mobile.msn.com/

 

Question: How do I use Outlook to view my Office Live emails?
Answer: Connecting a Microsoft Office Live email account to Outlook via the Outlook connector software is not yet fully supported.  It is something we are working on and plan to have available soon.  When we do have this available I’ll make sure to have a posting on this blog.

 

Question: How can I forward mails from my Office Live inbox to some other account?
Answer:  We don’t support this today but we’ve heard the request and might consider some functionality in this area for the future… but no promises.

 

Question: How do I get a product key?
Answer: You don’t need one anymore!  This has led to quite an increase in our overall subscribers which is great to see.

 

Question: When will I be able to use try out Office Live?  I can’t do it today because I’m not a US resident!
Answer: Starting in late 2006, we are planning to offer Microsoft Office Live in more countries/locales but for now it’s still US based only.

 

Question: How do I transfer my domain to OfficeLive.com and what exactly does that mean to me?
Answer:  You can in fact transfer your existing domain name to Office Live. The process is quite simple, and is described here.  One of the things to note though is that if you transfer the domain to be hosted by Office Live that will mean we change several settings with the domain registry to match our servers.  We don't allow advanced management of domains registered with our system; Office Live domains are meant to work only with Office Live web sites and Office Live e-mail accounts.  Also, several people have asked me specific questions about the status of their domain transferring to Office Live.  Sadly the process doesn’t always go smoothly, domains can be locked for a variety of reasons.  My best answer at this time is to go through Support and make sure they are aware of the specific issue you are seeing.  We are working to make this process easier and more robust in the very near future.

 

Once transferred to us you no longer have to pay for the domain name, even if you sign up for the Basics offer. If you sign up for Essentials, then you will need to pay the monthly Essentials subscription fee after the beta period ends.

Question: Hey, this thing is free but I see a charge on my credit card for $1!
Answer:  We’re working on making this clearer in the information around sign-up but basically to validate your card Billing sometimes has to make a charge and then refund that charge once it comes through.  In most cases this isn’t even seen, but sometimes the ‘refund’ doesn’t post back right away so there can be a delay between the test-charge and the refund of the $1.

 

And the big one ;-)

 

Question: Is Office Live feature complete?
Answer:  Absolutely not!  We will continue to add features for as long as we exist (hopefully a very, very long time!).  Some of these features might be added while we’re still in Beta but most will come after we have exited Beta.

 

Thanks for all the questions, and keep them coming!