As Matt mentioned in his May 08 post below, if you use Office Live Essentials with Outlook Connector, you can manage your personal calendar and contacts—the ones associated with your Office Live e-mail account—in Outlook. These are the calendar and contacts that you can view in your Office Live e-mail account after you click Inbox in Office Live. But it’s important to realize that you can also work with Office Live Business Applications calendars and contacts in Outlook as well! The difference is that Business Applications data can be viewed by anyone who has at least read-only access to Business Applications, whereas your personal calendar and contacts can be viewed only by you and those with whom you explicitly share them. In this post we’ll look at exactly how to bring your Business Applications calendar into Outlook, and how to import Outlook contacts into Business Applications.

View the Business Applications calendar in Outlook

If you haven’t already downloaded and installed Outlook Connector, see Matt’s instructions and the download link in his May 08 post below. You should get a prompt in Outlook asking for the sign-in information for the Web account you want to view. Type your Office Live sign-in information. If you don’t get the prompt, you can add another Web e-mail account at any time by clicking Add a New Account on the Outlook Connector menu in Outlook.

Open Internet Explorer and sign in to your Essentials site, click Business Applications in Member Center or left navigation pane, and then click Dashboard. Unless you’ve configured it another way, Dashboard opens on the Company View tab with a calendar on the left, and Customers and Projects applications on the right. Click either the My View or Company View tabs, depending on which calendar you want to display in Outlook. Under Calendar Events click Link to Outlook. You’ll get a security prompt in Outlook asking if you want to add the Business applications – Calendar Events folder to Outlook. Click Yes. A password prompt may also appear asking you to sign in to your Office Live site again. If so, type the same credentials as the ones you typed to access your Office Live Essentials site.

Now you can display your calendar by selecting its checkbox in the left navigation pane in Outlook. You can copy events from your Business Applications calendar to your Outlook (Exchange) calendar or Office Live personal calendar, but you can’t copy or add events to your Business Applications calendar in Outlook because the Business Applications calendar is read-only in Outlook.

Import Outlook contacts into Business Applications

Let’s say you have a lot of business contacts in Outlook. Now a great app comes along (Office Live ;) and you want all of those Outlook contacts in your Business Applications so you can access them from anywhere. Not a problem.

Sign in to your Essentials site and under Business Applications in Member Center click Customer Manager. Just under the words “Contact Manger,” click the Business Contacts tab, which shows the list of contacts that you want to add to. Click the Import from Outlook link, as in the following screenshot.

This opens the Choose Profile dialog box. Select Default Outlook Profile in the Profile Name drop-down (or any profile that you want), and then click OK. The Select Users to Import dialog box opens, as in the following screenshot.

By adjusting which list is selected in the “Show Names from the” drop-down box in the upper right of the dialog box, you can display which contacts to choose from. Click a contact and then click Add. When you’re through adding names, click OK. A security prompt appears asking if you want to allow the names to be exported from Outlook. Click Yes. Imported names in Contact Manager have “!New” next to them to make them easy to locate.

That’s about it for this post. Because of limited space, we’ve only scratched the surface of using Outlook with Office Live. Because our focus is on Business Applications, we worked with the Business Applications calendar in this post, not the Office Live personal calendar.

Stay tuned to this blog for other great how-to posts about using Excel or other Office programs with Office Live. A final word: Don’t be afraid to try anything that you think might help streamline your business processes.

-Tara, Lead Program Manager 

Hello again! Today, we are going to introduce the first of our profile companies. Meet Mike Ingram, the owner of Ingram Equipment Company (Mike’s my father-in-law, which explains why his is the first company to be profiled). Mike has been in business since 1989, selling pile driving equipment and supplies. Ingram Equipment has been on the web since 1996, at www.IngramEquipment.com.

Like many of our customers, Mike’s talents lie in areas other than computers. Currently, Mike is hosting his website through a local company, and editing the site using Microsoft FrontPage. FrontPage is a great tool for visually editing a website, but to get the site just right, you do need some special knowledge of HTML and web design. There have been a couple of occasions when a modification to Mike’s website caused the home page to be non-functional, until he could upload a fix.

Mike spends a lot of his time tracking available equipment, and keeping track of who is in the market for what equipment. Mike’s current filing system is somewhat ad-hoc; most of his customer data is kept on (lots of) legal pads, spread throughout his work area. While unorthodox, this filing system has worked successfully for Mike for many years.

When a customer (either potential or returning) contact’s Mike about a piece of equipment, they primarily communicate with him via email. Currently, Mike’s email is handled by a local hosting company; not the same company who handles his website hosting. Over the past year, Mike has missed out on four deals that he knows of, due to email outages, and mail servers being slow or down. A couple of times, Mike has been working on very time-sensitive deals, and his email service delayed delivery of his mail for several hours.

In the next post, I’ll describe how Office Live can solve some of Mike’s problems, and increase his productivity, while making his daily work load smaller, and providing more business intelligence.

Cullen Waters, SDET

Hello everyone! My name is Cullen Waters, and I am a newly-hired SDET on the Office Live team. My primary responsibilities are stress testing our application, and testing that our performance is up to your high standards. In addition to our primary roles, all of us on the Office Live team are tasked with keeping our customers in mind, and constantly striving to make our product more useful to you.

To that end, posted on the walls in our area of the MS Campus, there are profiles of some of our “target customers”. These profiles serve to keep us focused on our customers as real people, not just as “the customer”. When designing features, we try to keep Bill Bauer, Sara Teiter, and Ed Hudson in mind.

One of the reasons I chose to join the Office Live team is because my background includes working with several small businesses, seeing to their IT needs. Over the course of the next few posts, I will be sharing several stories with you. These stories will feature some of the companies I have worked with over the years, and explain how I think those companies would benefit from using Office Live.

I will be focusing several posts on each profile, in order for our team members to have a better understanding of you, our customers. Hopefully, these posts will also serve to illustrate the benefits of Office Live accounts, and might just help you improve productivity by using our application.

Cullen Waters, SDET

Over on the Microsoft Small Business Connections site there is monthly audio series called Connections: Unplugged. This is a monthly audio series around Microsoft small-business solutions. Our own Dean Nicolls has the latest audio entry and it’s all about Microsoft Office Live! From the site:

Is your business invisible to potential customers? Without a web presence, the answer is probably yes. Dean Nichols of Microsoft's Office Live team will take you through all of the options available to you with this brand new offering and share how you can get it for free! As one of Microsoft’s latest online offerings, Office Live can you help you project a professional image and stay in touch with your customers with easy-to-use tools.

So, if you want to hear what Dean has to say head on over to the site and download the audio file today!

-- Matt Rolak, SDET Lead

Matthew.Rolak@microsoft.com

It’s time for another Q&A posting for the blog. Thanks to our new Community site I have even more questions to answer! If you don’t see an answer to your # 1 issue here then drop me an email AND post your question out to the community. I try to answer all emails I get but sometimes I lose a mail or two via the Junk mail filters. But, for now I’ve got my questions ready and I bring you the 2nd installment of ‘Customer Questions’

How do I provide Feedback?

There are several ways today but I’ll try to sum them up here:

• Community web site via OfficeLiveCommunity This is ‘forum’ style set of boards on Office Live. Go here to connect with the community for questions and ideas. The product team responds regularly to questions AND reads these boards for feedback
• Submit feedback via Feedback.OfficeLive.com This allows you to provide ‘free form’ feedback directly to our team
• Comments on the blog entries or even emailed questions to Matt (note, I may not respond as fast as the community via comments or the boards as I’m only one person ;-)

When will we support Internet Explorer 7?

We plan to support IE7 fully by the time IE7 ships its final version. We are trying to fix any critical issues if possible before IE7 ships (so that IE7 Beta customers can use Office Live Beta) but we aren’t planning to fully support it until they are on their final released code.

Does Outlook Connector work with Word as my email editor?

Yes it should work fine. I’m running this way on 2 machines myself and it seems to work fine.

Can I change the Passport I used for signup?

At this time we don’t support transfer of the ‘owner’ Passport to a different passport. It is something we’ve heard concerns about and will take into consideration for the future.

How do I edit HTML?

Answered on the Community here, reprinted for the blog below:

In Basics today there is no support for direct HTML editing, it is something we've heard a bunch of feedback on and are considering for the future (after all, we are only in Beta right now so many features are still to come!)For Essentials you can use FrontPage to create/upload your entire site and thus do any HTML editing you need :)

How do I fix a broken domain transfer?

We’ve recently shipped an update to the site to make this easier for the majority of domain transfer failures. If you log in to your Member Center (login at OfficeLive.com and you should see a Button in the message about retrying your domain transfer. Click on this button to re-try and it should kick your domain back through the process. Sadly this is still a very hard problem to fix for everyone so if you don’t see retry button or your domain still fails to transfer you’ll need to contact support.

Here is an example of what the button and message look like in a Member Center for a failed transfer:

What about a shopping cart/commerce feature?

We’ve heard this request loud and clear from lots of people. We are still in Beta now but this area is one we’re most certainly looking to invest in for the future (after Beta and beyond).

Why can’t I find my website in search engines?

This has been a rather popular answer. If you're already a customer here is a link to a Learning Center article on it. Also, below is a community posting answer from Craig (link to the community posting of this answer is here)

A web site on Office Live is no different than anywhere else, except it's easier to build :) The frustrations you are having are due to how search engines work, not Office Live. The search engines generally only list your web site in two ways:

 

1) If you submit it to them directly. If you haven't done that you can do so here:

• MSN: http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx
• Yahoo: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request
• Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

NOTE: Getting indexed can take anywhere from 1 day to a month or more.

2) By finding links that point to your web site. This is the best way to get indexed by the engines since to the engines a link means someone else values your web site enough to link to it, so it must be worth indexing. To get some links to your site, ask friends, related sites, and try submitting to some directories. The best links to get are those most closely related to the topic of your site.

Another important piece of this is understanding if you are actually listed in the search engines index or not. Here's the easiest way to tell:

• MSN: Enter site:yourdomain.com in the search box. For example, site:microsoft.com
• Yahoo: Go to Yahoo Site Explorer http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ and enter your domain, here's an example.
• Google: Is the exact same as MSN, here's an example.

That’s it for this edition. As always please keep the questions coming and I’ll try to answer them

-- Matt Rolak, SDET Lead

Matthew.Rolak@microsoft.com