FedEx Office (formerly known as FedEx Kinko’s or just Kinko’s) is a 24-hour-a-day shop in most places where you can walk in to do a quick scan, print, fax or any other number of office-related stuff.

To note: FedEx Office is just one example of a store like this. Even the sleepiest of small towns in the USA have some kind of local office store when you can run off a copy, print something, get something faxed out, etc. They’re usually located in the busier part of town. Continued

On Monday I wrote an article about Office Live and Google Apps. In that article I said:

Neither has any blogging capability whatsoever.

I was corrected on this concerning the Microsoft offering. By whom? The Microsoft Office Live Team themselves (see comments in that article).

Microsoft Office Live does do blogs and rather easily by using Live Spaces.

This is how it’s done:

When you’re using the Web Design Tool inside the admin panel, you click inside an editable area, then click the Module button, then Live Spaces blog. After that you just type in the URL of the Spaces blog (i.e. your-username.spaces.live.com). The blog does have to be active first.

Looks like this:

After you add in your Spaces blog, just save and it’s done and live instantly.

Kudos to Microsoft for putting blogging ability into their Office Live Small Business offering. This is definitely a very cool feature and moreover easy and usable.

Much thanks to the MS team for pointing this out because I consider it essential that businesses - including small ones - should be able to blog easily. Spaces combined with Office Live Small Business takes care of that in short order.

Over the weekend I finally decided to check out Microsoft Office Live Small Business. I wanted to see what it was all about and what I could actually do with it. Note: This is not to be confused with Microsoft Office Live Workspace on the same site. This is labeled as “an online extension of Microsoft Office” - and that’s totally different. If you have MS Office installed, you can use that. If not (which I don’t), you can’t.

In the past I did use Google Apps before - but more on that later. Continued

As of a few months ago, I have gone from working exclusively at the office to working from home at least one day a week. So far my transition has been extremely smooth with relatively no speed bumps. Of course, this was prefaced on my part with making my two working environments functional for me. As a service to others out there who have considered working from home, I’m going to share some of the preparations I made as well as outline some benefits (some obvious and some not so obvious) and concerns regarding working from home.

Continued