Several customers in the community and on the blog have been asking for more information about future fixes, future plans/schedules, and current issues. At this point we can't be very specific on the 'future' but we do have a plan in place which we are executing on. What I can say at this point is that we are planning to launch in Beta for UK, Germany, Japan and France in late 2006 (find out more about these betas here) while we also come out of Beta for the US. At that point we will have a bunch of fixes and new features for all our customers to play with. We WILL blog and write about these new features before shipping, I promise… we just don't have a timeline for that information to be made public yet. Ok?

Now, that covers the future plans… what about current issues? This posting should be the first in a 'series' that we are looking to expand upon over time. Below I've detailed some fixes we just shipped to production which may be of interest to the community. In the post-beta 'future' we are looking to continue to do this AND potentially give planned schedules for upcoming fixes (and maybe even a few features!). We are also looking into creating a 'known issues' list on this blog to help with community/blog questions asking about things we are already aware of, so check back soon!

Fixes and features just shipped:

• We now allow Basics customers to buy add-on domains! We've heard many requests to have this functionality on the Basics subscription so it's now available. If you log in to your Basics account and go to 'Domain Management' you should now see the option to purchase an add-on domain for your site. These add-ons are a re-direct to your main site. So if you already own 'MySuperCoolSite.com' for free with your Basics subscription you can now purchase 'MySuperCoolSite.net' to also redirect to that same web site. Note, this add-on domain does have a cost ($8.95 a year)
• Warning emails for using storage are going to be less frequent. From those customers close to or at their storage limits for their public and private sites we have heard you don't want to get a warning mail every day… so we've changed this. Now you shouldn't get a warning nearly as frequently (it should be on the order of about 7 days for now.. may change in the future again based on feedback)
• Image gallery script error for Internet Explorer 7 users. We've fixed a few issues with the image gallery and IE7. This is part of our ongoing efforts to fully support IE7 by the time it too comes out of Beta.

Now, I'm sure several of the issues people care about are not on this list (the 'SR|pagename' known issue comes to mind first). That doesn't mean we're never going to fix them it just means they aren't fixed yet. We are consistently and constantly going over all the feedback we receive (email, community, support, and via our feedback links) and are always looking to hear more. We will be adding a known issues list to this blog soon. And we will have more to announce on specific features or fixes in the coming weeks and months.

So, hopefully these fixes and features helped some of you, for those still waiting we hear you and appreciate your support. If you've got an issue or suggestion you want to share please follow any of the links above and let us know. Thanks!

- Matt Rolak, SDET Lead

Calling all developers… As promised, Office Live has started releasing materials for Solution Developers in concert with the Worldwide Partner Conference in Boston last week.  Check it out: 

• Developer Center on MSDN – Keep up on the news with the Office Live platform; get links to technical resources and much more.
• Developer Guide Partner “preview”  – Microsoft partners can download a copy of the developer guide preview and a business opportunity white paper.  If you are not a Microsoft partner, go here to sign up.  It’s easy.
• What is Office Live? (video interview) – The great folks from Channel 9 stopped by the office to talk to Brian, Tara and David about the developer platform.  Watch this for a good introduction to the  Office Live Solution Developer platform.

We haven’t been pushing for developers to adopt our current v1.0 Beta.  That’s because it was built on Windows SharePoint Services v2.  Since we are moving to WSS v3 in our upcoming release, it made the most sense to have developers start off with that.  So, if you are interested in becoming an Office Live Solution Developer, start ramping up on WSS v3.  Here is a link to their SDK for Beta 2.  And check out the other great resources above.

- Chris, Program Manager

Some Office Live customers have asked about creating a privacy statement, so that sounds like a good topic for this post. Even if your Web site is not for a business and you operate a nonprofit or some other kind of site, visitors may be more comfortable and more likely to communicate with you if you put them at ease about your use of their personal information. This can be as simple as promising not to sell their e-mail address to spammers if a site visitor sends you email. For businesses, having a privacy statement in place can be an important part of establishing business relationships.

You don’t have to be a privacy expert to create a privacy statement. There are a number of free and cost-based privacy statement generators online. We’ll get to those in a minute.

What is privacy? Here’s a definition: Privacy is giving a person control over the collection, use, and distribution of their personal data, and respecting their right to be left alone. Sounds revolutionary and ‘right on’ at the same time, empowering from the customer’s POV.

And what’s the difference between a privacy policy and a privacy statement? A policy is a document created to guide your company; it says, in essence, this is what we believe regarding our customers’ privacy. The privacy statement explains that policy then to your customers.

Preparation

Before you can create your statement, you have to determine your practices for collecting, storing, and using the personal information of your visitors and/or customers. If you have a business, how do you typically gather information about your customers, and what do you do with it after you get it? Privacy isn’t just about personal information that is collected online; it may be collected through public records, regular mail, phone calls, and meetings. Your privacy statement should cover that information also. For more information about how to become aware of your company’s current privacy practices, take the Better Business Bureau’s online assessment.

Make sure your current and future practices line up with the law and fair information practices

Does your site collect personal information from children? If so you should be aware of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). For more information, see The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act Web page on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Web site. For detailed information about other privacy laws that may apply to your business, see A Review of Federal and State Privacy Laws on the Better Business Bureau Web site.

In addition to privacy law, government studies have also identified fair information practices that help protect consumers’ privacy interests. These practices include notice, choice, access, and security. For more information, see Fair Information Practice Principles on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Web site.

Use a privacy statement generator

Here are two privacy policy generators that are recommended by the Better Business Bureau on their Create your own privacy policy Web page.

• The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) Privacy Policy Generator
• Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Privacy Policy Generator

You can also find a number of other free and fee-based generators by searching the Internet. Read the explanatory text and then follow the instructions of the generator you plan to use. You may need to edit the policy the generator creates to exactly tailor it to your business, and to include how Microsoft Office Live treats your customers’ data (see the next section).

Also, note that free policy generators will probably not assume legal responsibility for the policy that is created; cost-based generators may not either.

How Microsoft Office Live treats your customers’ data

Because Microsoft Office Live is involved in transmitting and storing personal information about your site visitors and customers, it is a good idea to also include text in your privacy statement about the data Microsoft collects about your customers. Office Live policy is as follows:

Microsoft does not collect personal information about your customers. The data that Office Live does collect is aggregated, which means that Office Live cannot identify nor define the activities of any individual.

Office Live does track—and provide to you in Site Reports—the following by using cookies or machine information.

• Your Web site traffic information, which includes unique users and page views.
• The kinds and versions of the Web browsers that your visitors use.
• The entry, most-requested, and exit pages on your site that visitors use.
• The referring domains that visitors use in coming to your site.
• The search engines that visitors use to come to your site by direct clicks.

The primary purpose of Office Live in gathering this information is to provide you with site statistics. Office Live may use this information to develop a cumulative view of traffic coming to sites in the Office Live service, which we will use to help improve services we provide you.

Communicate policy

Your first responsibility after creating a privacy statement is to adhere to it. To do that, you must communicate privacy policy internally to everyone in your company, and not only to those who directly deal with personal information.

Your commitment to your new privacy statement isn’t complete until your site visitors become aware of it. Note that once your privacy policy is publicly posted, you are legally obligated to honor it.

For more information

For more information about privacy as it relates to business, see the Better Business Bureau’s Privacy Made Simple Web page.

- Lyn Watts, Product Manager

We have now officially opened up our beta waitlist for the international beta of Office Live! It has been a VERY frequent request in the community and on this blog to have something available outside the US and this is our first step on that path. We are launching the international beta in France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom to start. You can sign up for the beta waitlist for each of these countries here.

Now, I realize this is only 4 countries and that some of the requests have been from countries not on this list. Rest assured, we hear you and are continuing to evaluate and explore the expansion of Office Live to even more countries. For the near future though, this beta expansion is limited to just these four.

The waitlist will run much the same as the initial waitlist for Office Live. This means we can’t guarantee participation for everyone who registers but we will continue to evaluate the list of request. This also means you don’t need to register for the waitlist multiple times, once is enough I promise you ;-)

So, if you’ve been waiting for Office Live and one of these countries works for you, head on over and sign up today!

- Matt Rolak, SDET Lead

Hello all and thank you for beta testing both IE7 and Office Live. Internet Explorer 7 beta 3 has arrived, give it a spin against your Office Live site. We’ve fixed the early glitches, based on your great feedback. We’ve concentrated first on the most important user scenarios.

For example:

• You will no longer see in Business Applications and Shared Sites pages the “blocked content” warnings by default.
• Some of your private sites pages were reported as phishing sites. This is fixed now.
• One of our most popular web parts – the Slide Show – was not visible, I’m sure you’ve noticed that. This was fixed in a mandatory patch to IE7 beta 2.  
• We’ve also fixed some JS errors and a few page rendering glitches.

There is more work to be done here as expected with Beta products and services, and we are aware that not everything runs as expected yet, like this rendering issue in Web site Page Editor: http://officeliveblog.spaces.msn.com/Default.aspx?beid=cns!7A0018FE70A946FB!266&d=1#postcns!7A0018FE70A946FB!266 that DR_DREW_IS_GOD reported in his comments... as posted in a comment below we are looking into it and have a workaround for now.  In the meantime, please continue to send us your feedback on what you think is most important to fix and we will continue working on improving the user experience.

Danut Moraru - MSFT

Hello everybody!

We have been meaning to write this post for a while; many of you have expressed, in one way or another, “Microsoft is not listening”.. but we are  (speaking here for the Office Live team)

I will set the expectation upfront: “listening” does not mean we will do everything we hear you ask for, I am sure you understand the many reasons why that is not possible; also I am not at liberty right now to get specific on timelines, so you will read a lot of “work in progress” in this post.

We care about our customers, and for many of us the real fun in this job is the opportunity to have a (as such is our intention) positive impact in people’s lives; thus we really want to know how it is working (or not) for you. Many of us participate by posting in these boards and many more simply read them; your post and comments are sent around on internal mails and used as part of scenarios and arguments to make product decisions. We also have a process to make sure we are thorough in taking in the feedback received through the boards and other channels (i.e. the feedback link you can find at the bottom of all Office Live pages) and we are incorporating other sources of feedback to that same process to make sure all get treated in the same way.

So enough for intro; here what we have heard you put forward as key “areas of opportunity” for Office Live (not trying to present a complete list, and taking some liberty in interpretation)

Allow more flexibility/capability to design the Web Site

This has been expressed in many different ways: requests for HTML, FTP, more/better templates, and issues with the fonts, background colors, etc.

This is one of those what I warned above I can’t comment on timelines; but this is something that is top of mind/work by our team; there are changes coming in the next release that will address this space and we think should answer many of the requests you have put forward. The lead PM of the team that works in this space is one of the regulars at these boards.

International Availability

It has been great to see the interest from countries other than the US for Office Live; I am sure you can appreciate it takes a while to make sure all of the i’s are dotted and the t’s crossed when you go outside the US. But rest assured we will be going international and very soon we will be able to announce which countries we will be gong in first.

E-commerce capabilities

Paraphrasing many of you have said: “how come you put forward this offerings for small businesses and yet you do not enable us to do business online?” All I am liberty to say at this time is: it is very clear for us how important is this scenario for some of you; we hear you.

E-mail

This one has had many different facets; we think we have addressed some but others remain. If I hear correctly what you are saying there are 2 key areas of mail feedback we are receiving at this point: a) Allow to read mail, manage calendar and contacts in outlook versus the web interface (possible to day for the subscribers to Essentials) and b) Allow forward from an Office Live mail account to another account.

Browser compatibility issues

We are working on this one; I am sure you appreciate this takes time and resources that we could also focus on addressing other things (i.e. the ones above); so is a careful balancing act how far and fast we go into this one.

Search Engine issues

Not going into details on this one; plenty of those in other threads across the boards. But bottom line there is work in progress to ensure we do all we can to facilitate search engines discovering your sites; but it has been said clearly many times there are many other things you can and should do to make your sites more discoverable.

As I said above I did not intended to make this a thorough list; but are any other ones that are top of mind that you think should have make it into the top 6 above?  Post back to this thread or contact me through the “contact us” form in www.filibertoselvas.com . This posting is also available on our Community site here.

Thanks again for the feedback!

Filiberto Selvas