Web-based applications have become more powerful and easier to over the last few years. Naturally, businesses of all sizes have started implementing browser-based applications to conduct their activities more easily and efficiently. Intranets are prevalent now-a-days, with businesses that are large enough to host their own applications in-house, which have made collaborative endeavors easier.
Small businesses, however, have mostly missed the intranet boat. Until recently, about the only affordable collaborative, intranet-like application available for little guys that don’t host their own servers was a hosted SharePoint service. Now Microsoft has bundled some features of SharePoint with domain registration, a website hosting package and an e-mail service into a hosted service called Office Live Essentials to offer a one-stop Internet/Intranet solution.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a column about Office Live Basics, a free domain registration and web hosting service from Microsoft. It is an outstanding value for small businesses that want simple calling-card web sites and a reliable e-mail service. Office Live Essentials is Basics’ big brother and offers significant improvements over the base level package. It is still in beta, but like most public betas these days, it is quite stable. After the beta, it will cost $29.95 per month for ten users.
Whenever people see similar-sounding services suffixed by words like Basics and Essentials and see different price tags on them, they automatically assume that the higher priced service will give them the ability to do what they could not do with the lower priced offering. This is particularly true of people who have tried out Office Live Basics, simply because it is free. So this is a good time to understand what Office Live Essentials is not.
As its name suggests, Office Live Basics is a very basic web hosting package. You can’t build stores with it, can’t maintain blogs with it, and can’t build communities with it. Naturally, people think that if they upgrade to a higher level package, Office Live Essentials, they will be able to do all these things through the web interface. Not so. As far as building the web site goes, Essentials offers exactly the same functionality that Basics does, except that it gives you an option to use Microsoft FrontPage to design your site. Now that you know that Essentials does not help you build stores, communities, and other esoteric online artifacts, we can proceed to see what it really does.
Like Office Live Basics, Essentials provides a domain registration service. You can either register a new domain through the service or transfer an existing domain. Once Office Live’s registrar starts managing your domain, you don’t have to pay additional registration fees. They are included in your subscription.
Office Live Essentials provides the same WYSIWYG editor as Office Live Basics to build a web site. The editor is suitable only for the simplest of sites. If you want a fancier web site with custom graphics, custom layout, and custom functionality, you can use Microsoft FrontPage instead of the WYSIWYG editor. But once you move to using FrontPage, you can’t use the WYSIWYG editor. All your site development must then be done with FrontPage. Office Live Essentials does not provide pre-canned applications such as shopping-carts and community-builders; you will have to write your own code for them, if you can, with FrontPage and a scripting language. Keep in mind that Essentials works only with FrontPage; you can’t use other site-building tools such as GoLive, ColdFusion, or Microsoft Publisher. But FrontPage is an upgrade over the WYSIWYG editor, nevertheless.
Office Live Essentials’ subscription includes access (and e-mail addresses) for ten users– an improvement over the five for Basics. You can buy additional five-packs, if required. As with Basics, the e-mail addresses are glorified Hotmail (or I should say Windows Live Mail) addresses that bear your domain name instead of hotmail’s or msn’s. But the most significant improvement over Basics is that Essentials e-mail service provides an Outlook Connecter which permits you to use Outlook as your e-mail client. You can use it to synchronize mail with Microsoft Outlook. You can also use Outlook to manage to manage multiple e-mail accounts. This last feature is significant because you can’t forward Office Live mail.
While these improvements to site-building and e-mail are certainly significant, by themselves they are not worth the thirty bucks you have to pay for the service. The service becomes a bargain ONLY if you plan to use Office Live Essentials’ collaborative features. With these collaborative features, you can build custom lists from random data items and apply custom view to them. They also allow you to build and share document libraries. Office Live Essentials inherits this functionality from SharePoint. In fact, if you have used SharePoint, you will be very comfortable with Office Live Essentials.
The building blocks of Office Live Essentials’ collaborative functionality are Applications and Sites. Applications are views of custom data lists. They are not programs as the word application is commonly used to imply. So you can’t use these “applications” to file your taxes or keep your accounts. An Expense application, for example, is just a list of your expenses with a custom view applied to it; you can’t transfer them to QuickBooks, like a real “application” would be able to do. Microsoft has pre-canned thirty-odd such applications for various purposes, such as listing employees, managing contacts, tracking company assets and monitoring progress of a project.
A “site”, in Office Live Essentials’ parlance, is a container to group and hold applications. You can create “Customer” site, for example, by grouping customer list and customer projects together. You can then give selective access to the site to your colleagues, or even to customers. All those who have access to the site can share the data and documents on the site, which is a much better alternative than e-mailing documents and notes back and forth.
You can use sites creatively. If you have a meeting with a client, you can create a “Meeting Workspace” site that has the agenda, related documents, and reference materials. Or you can create a “Team Site” to exchange documents and information with members of your team. You can, in effect, create intranets and extranets at will.
But Office Live Essentials is appropriate only for those businesses that have the need for people to share a lot of information and documents in collaborative projects. If you are a one-man plumbing service, you may not need collaborative features. But if you are tired of e-mailing documents back and forth, sending the copies of the same information to many different people, figuring out which of the 200 copies of the same document is the latest, or repeatedly collating information that you must extract from communications from the same set of people, you should try out Office Live Essentials. It is still free.
If you belong to its target audience, Office Live Essentials is an outstanding value. But if are looking at it as the ultimate web-hosting power-package with shopping-carts, payment gateways, and what-not, you are barking up the wrong tree.
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