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7月7日 Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 and Office LiveHello 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:
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 7月6日 We Hear You!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. 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 6月27日 How to Work with Office Live Business Applications Data in OutlookAs 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 6月23日 Customer Profile: Ingram Equipment CompanyHello 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 6月19日 WebCast: Manage your small business with Office LiveExpert Zone Support WebCast: Manage your small business with Office Live
Session Summary: Thursday, June 29, 2006: 10:00 AM Pacific time (Coordinated Universal Time -7 hours) In this Expert Zone Support WebCast, technology expert Justin Harrison explains how to use Microsoft Office Live to manage and enhance your small business. Learn how you can use Office Live to analyze business Web site traffic, use Outlook connectivity to access Microsoft Office Live Mail, and share information inside the business without the problems of managing your own information management department.
The Webcast covers:
- The difference between Windows Live and Office Live
- Different versions of Office Live
- Differences between each version of Office Live
- Each category of business application
For more information: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920948
Justin Harrison 6月9日 Who is Office Live best suited for?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 6月2日 Audio Webcast about Office Live now availableOver 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:
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 Customer Questions Answered, 2nd EditionIt’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:
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:
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)
That’s it for this edition. As always please keep the questions coming and I’ll try to answer them
-- Matt Rolak, SDET Lead 5月19日 Don’t be misled…As a result of registering your domain, you may receive e-mail or direct mail from a third party that appears at first glance to be a billing statement or an invoice related to the registration of your domain name. Upon closer examination, it is actually a solicitation for services related to your domain name (for example, search engine optimization). Please note that the domain you registered through Microsoft Office Live is free and carries no hidden fees. Microsoft will not send you unsolicited mail requesting credit card numbers, passwords, or other sensitive information. We take your privacy very seriously and pledge not to sell your personal information to any third parties. That said, the registrant information for your domain name is available in a public database (see http://www.icann.org/faq/#whois), regardless of whom you registered your domain with. Domain name registrant information is public for several good reasons, including: 1) rapid resolution of technical problems; 2) enforcement of consumer protection, trademark, and other laws; and 3) reduction of fraudulent activities. But, because of this public availability, third-parties do have access to your name, contact information and domain name for their marketing communications, some of which can be misleading. So, please read the small print.
Dean Nicolls Office Live Product Manager 5月8日 That was Refreshing…We have just completed a ‘Refresh’ of our Beta of Office Live and I wanted to let everyone know what’s new. In the world of online services it is much easier to update your system to the benefit of all your customers (no need to download a service pack like with ‘box software’J) We shipped a few new ‘customer visible’ features and several back-end improvements but I’ll focus mostly on what is visible to the customer in this posting.
Essentials now fully supports Outlook Connector Essentials inboxes now have email, contacts, and calendar access enabled for Microsoft Office Outlook connector. What is that you say? Outlook Connector (download it here if you have inbox created via your Essentials subscription) is an add-on for Outlook which will allow you to connect directly to your Office Live inbox using Microsoft Office Outlook 2002 (XP) or later. Once connected you can read and write email as well as access your contacts and calendar using Outlook. Using Outlook connector you can always be in sync with your Office Live Inbox, have offline access to your information, and access any number of Office Live Essentials created inboxes from one central place (simply add the multiple email accounts to Outlook). A link to download Outlook Connector will also be available in the Member Center if you have an inbox created in an Essentials subscription. So if you’re already an Essentials customer, try it out today; if you’re a Basics subscriber maybe this will be the reason to upgrade to Essentials ;) If you are already a customer today the two links below provide some more information specific to Outlook Connector and Office Live (sorry, you have to be a logged-in customer to view these links): Benefits of Outlook Connector& Getting Started with Outlook Connector.
Owners now get a monthly report on their site Each month the owner of the subscription should look to their inbox for an Activity Report. This report has a summary of information available directly on the Office Live site but neatly packaged to give you a quick overview of what’s been happening in the last month on your business site. There are different reports for Basics, Collaboration, and Essentials but the basic information given is:
Our emails to you can be updated faster This is more of a backend change but the emails you receive (Welcome mails, alerts about your storage limits, etc) can now be updated much more rapidly to better serve the customer. So, if there are parts of the mails you receive today that you find confusing or you have suggestions to improve the mails please let us know!
Backend changes to help the future We have also made a large number of backend changes which will be the foundation for changes to come later. Today we are still in Beta but in the not-so-distant future we will be out of Beta and fully released. When that happens we’ll have many new features and we plan to have many, many more over the years to come! But, to accomplish all this future growth we need to lay a solid foundation. Some of the first major blocks of that foundation were put in place with this refresh of Office LiveSo there you have it, a few new features for customers and some important steps towards the future. If you want to see these new features in action sign-up for Office Live today! Or if you are already a subscriber look to your inbox (directly from Outlook if you’ve got Essentials and download the connector) for the Activity report and enjoy! And, as always we appreciate your feedback so drop me an email or post a reply to the community site. To get things started I’ve also posted this entry to the Feedback community forum for Office Live.
-- Matt Rolak, SDET Lead 4月28日 Drilling Down Deep into Shared Sites and Business ApplicationsChris 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.
Permissions
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 The Office Live Community is here!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!
-Avon Fernandes, Program Manager 4月24日 Comments WelcomeUntil 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.
- Samarth, Lead Program Manager 4月19日 What is Essentials?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.
- Chris
Program Manager, Biz Apps and Solution Developer Platform 4月17日 Answering the customer questions received so farI 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!
-- Matt Rolak, SDET Lead
4月5日 Your ‘wait’ is overSince we debuted our waitlist for the Microsoft Office Live Beta back in November 2005 we have had over 275,000 customers sign-up in our Beta waitlist, and we thank each and every one of them for signing up. But what we’ve heard over and over is: please don’t make me wait in a list; I want to try Office Live NOW!! So, good news to everyone who hasn’t already gotten a product key, your wait is over (maybe before it even started!) We have dropped the requirement of a product key from our signup! The Beta is still only open to US residents for now, but ANY US resident with a valid credit card can sign up for the Beta and experience Office Live! All you need to do now is pick your product (Basics, Collaboration or Essentials) and pick your domain. So head over to OfficeLive.com now to get your Beta subscription started. The fine print: Product keys and the waitlist are off ‘for now’ but may come back again at a later date. We may have to turn them back on if demand exceeds our expectations and capacity for the beta… so sign up now before everyone else ;-) -- Matt Rolak, SDET Lead Matthew.Rolak@microsoft.com 3月29日 For DevelopersLast 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.
- Brian Jeans (Group Program Manager) and Marja Koopmans (Director of Channel & Business) 3月22日 What’s in a Domain Name?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.
- Matt Rolak, SDET Lead 3月14日 Greetings from QAHello 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.
Hello, world!At 6 AM on February 15, about two dozen Microsofties huddled in a conference room to watch the launch of Microsoft Office Live. Our Ops team flipped a virtual switch, and Office Live was really Live!
Now that we're live, we need a blog. And this is it.
The people who'll post here are members of the Office Live team - real Microsoft software engineers, testers, program managers... the people who built and maintain the service.
We blog because we're passionate about Office Live, and care deeply about our users. We'll write about the features we've worked on, and the features we haven't. Occasionally, we might even make some news. So be sure to check back. And we want to hear from you. If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, please send them to us at OLBlog -at- microsoft -dot- com
To the over-100,000 people who signed up for a beta product key before we even went live: Thank you!! We realize that it's hard to wait for a product key, but it's probably not the best idea to put 100,000 people on version one of a beta service on day one.
So we're sending out the keys in batches. If you haven't gotten one yet, you probably will soon. If you haven't signed up for the beta yet, there's no reason to wait. Get a free domain name, web site, e-mail accounts, and more at http://officelive.com - Samarth, Lead Program Manager |
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