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February 15, 2006

Microsoft Office Live goes into Beta

Michael Arrington

45 comments »

Microsoft Office Live went into beta today. The service was first revealed at a Microsoft event last fall - you can see my post about it here.

This is not an online version of Microsoft Office. It is a set of online tools for businesses to help them have a web and email presence at a very low cost (starting at free with ad support). The core tools are a free non-microsoft domain name, website and up to 50 email accounts with 2 GB of storage each.

For a small company needing a informational website, it will be great. Given that the domain name, website building, hosting and email will all be free, this will be very attractive to a small business.

For customers needing more, Microsoft will offer a suite of additional productivity applications - 22 in all were announced last fall. They will also support third party applications - ADP’s payroll software was shown integrated into Office Live. A set of APIs will be available for third parties to add their application functionality into Office Live.

Among the additional applications is an office document collaboration tool. You can share an office document real time with others, allowing them to view and edit it. Impressive.

Office Live should become a starting point for small businesses wanting a web presence and a general platform to run their business operations.

If you are interested in participating in the beta, sign up at the main Office Live site. It is currently only open to U.S. businesses - the full service will launch later this year.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 15th, 2006 at 6:40 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Srinivasan

    February 15th, 2006 at 7:28 pm

    All,

    I dont understand Microsoft’s Strategy here. Are they moving towards hosted office? Thats the impression I get.

    1. What happens to the writelys of the world, given the “online office collaboration”

    2. Can we map this to google’s efforts (the recent gmail for ur domain). Who gains, who loses?

    3. If I am a small business guy, should I go for Live, or shd I buy Office Products? If I go with live, at what point does MS expect to milk me (move to Office Suite)

    Answers?

  2. Will W.

    February 15th, 2006 at 7:34 pm

    Wow… Leave it to MicroSuck to put thousands of small web shops out of business just like that.

  3. Adam Marsh

    February 15th, 2006 at 9:12 pm

    I was just looking at WebOffice from WebEx, which seems to be the closest thing to Office Live. I’d be interested to know if anyone has used WebOffice or a competitor — it certainly would be nice to have a single place for a workgroup or company to share files, documents, calendars, contacts, etc…and if it also can do some things like bug tracking, expense reports, and basic CRM, so much the better! Seems like there’s lots of good point solutions, but an integrated platform would be more convenient.

  4. Adam Marsh

    February 15th, 2006 at 9:15 pm

    Argh, I forgot to click the coComment bookmarklet AGAIN! OK, I’ve just got to see if it works, so I’ll leave another comment — sorry!

  5. CetaMac

    February 15th, 2006 at 9:25 pm

    Yup, I agree with Will W, thinkfree is one of the examples. I wonder if a idea online has the copy right? :D

  6. vucabei

    February 15th, 2006 at 9:26 pm

    “This is not an online version of Microsoft Office. It is a set of online tools for businesses to help them have a web and email presence at a very low cost”

    What an awful name for the service. They are going to end up going to a lot of trouble trying to inform consumers just what the heck Microsoft Office Live is.

  7. feng

    February 15th, 2006 at 9:40 pm

    I am very eager to office live!!!!!

  8. CetaMac

    February 15th, 2006 at 10:02 pm

    One thing I argee with the official talks, Internet-based services include free Web site, domain name and e-mail accounts.

  9. Adam Marsh

    February 15th, 2006 at 10:24 pm

    Wow, I had no idea…coComment only picks up comments that are from other coComment users! That’s really not clear from the description of the service on their site. OK, I found out about Assaf’s co.mments.com and switched to that…a bit rough, but much better.

  10. Shrikant Joshi

    February 15th, 2006 at 10:53 pm

    Office Live.

    What’s next? Home Live?
    “Home Live lets you manage your kids from the office and Office Live lets you manage your office from your home.”

    Work from home and home from work. Howzzat??!!

    Now there’s an idea for Scoble…

  11. Clyde Smith

    February 15th, 2006 at 11:28 pm

    That is an awful name. I had seen it in passing before but hadn’t read about it till now. I had assumed that it was Microsoft Office in live form, silly me.

  12. Philippe Borremans

    February 16th, 2006 at 12:20 am

    So PR to state that “This is not an online version of MS Office”…

    “Online version of MS Office” is exactly the only explanation that the average web user will understand.

    Ps: Next to Thinkfree there’s also Goffice…

  13. Al

    February 16th, 2006 at 4:24 am

    Ok I admit to totally misunderstanding what ‘Office Live’ actually was (Me Thinking it being a cut down version of Office as a web app, silly me). But actually the more I read the clearer what it actually is becomes. It is in fact an add on to Office, that is it compliments an existing Office install (I am convinced we will see it on Office 12 as an install option).

    The reason being that it is aimed at office clients (Windows only, no safari support sorry Mac users). To get the most out of this you need a number of Office components installed :
    1) Import/export features appear to be outlook specific (Multiple vesrions of office supported)
    2) The datasheet and embedded functions require Office to be installed (latest version only I think).
    3) The share point like integration (active doc sharing) uses many Office specific document type (And iI think active X based) recognition to acheive embedded editing type functions.

    So in summary it looks like they are taking a number of their existing server based products like Exchange, Sharepoint etc.. and hosting cut down versions of them on your behalf.

    For existing Office users in a micro business that only use IE (IE specific support at the mo) and windows (Not macs or other OS) this is a easy management version of their server products on demand.

    What it is not :
    1) A web application, more a web presense/ondemand service for a closed platform (Windows+office)
    2) An online office replacement for micro business
    3) Microsoft building Web 2.0 Apps (This is’nt one, building and Office add on does’nt count)

    I think that the ‘Office Live’ moniker is quite frankly deceiving to most people. C’mon Microsoft this looks like a backward step, more like a response to google than new or innovating web 2.0 applications.

  14. Marcus

    February 16th, 2006 at 4:39 am

    I’ll guess I’ll leave the obligatory “I can’t even view it on my Mac” comment. It just seems like since it’s a webapp they’d make it cross-browser but I guess in a way it makes sense for them to keep it IE only.

  15. Akram

    February 16th, 2006 at 6:09 am

    wonder why ppl hate microsoft so much… i used fox but don’t know why its bugging me like hell… im getting adicted to IE7 now…

  16. Peter

    February 16th, 2006 at 7:08 am

    I have a beta key, but it still requires a credit card before you can test it. :(

  17. Nir Ben-Dor

    February 16th, 2006 at 3:07 pm

    The fact that Microsoft named today their adwords/adsense version (ContentAds) and releases Microsoft Live is no coincidence.

    It’s becoming obvious that Bill and Steve sat down on their roadmap a while back and said, why bother. Google has a better one, let’s copy it.

    So Microsoft is a Google copycat which wants to get advertising on everything and follow Google’s success.

    http://www.comagz.com/

  18. sybrgh0st

    February 17th, 2006 at 7:02 am

    Somebody please explain to me why there’s a Nextel ad on the site. Are they strategic partners or is MS just that greedy that they’ve got ad-space available on their sites now.

    What’s next? Windows Live with Google-Ads (showing links to Linux distros)?! :)

  19. Leon Bollerup

    February 17th, 2006 at 3:25 pm

    –> What’s next? Windows Live with Google-Ads (showing links to Linux distros)?!

  20. D

    February 27th, 2006 at 4:40 pm

    Not that I’m a life-long fan of Microsoft, but let’s look at Comment 24 above: “Comment by Leon Bollerup — February 17, 2006 @ 3:25 pm

    –> What’s next? Windows Live with Google-Ads (showing links to Linux distros)?!”

    That’s been done already, by the folks who “ThinkFree”:

    “9. Advertisements. As consideration for using the Service, you agree and understand that ThinkFree will display ads and other information adjacent to and related to the content of your file and/or email. ThinkFree Office Online serves relevant ads using a completely automated process that enables ThinkFree to effectively target dynamically changing content, such as document and/or email. No human will read the content of your file and/or email in order to target such advertisements or other information without your consent, and no file or email content or other personally identifiable information will be provided to advertisers as part of the Service. ThinkFree Office Online may begin the Service without advertisements and add them later at a time to be determined by ThinkFree.” (Source: http://online.thinkfree.com/terms.jsp)

    In other words, you only think it’s free. I was very tempted to say “TANSTAAFL!” and link in this Wikipedia article, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde.....d=37952106 until, that is, I remembered just how much I had paid for access to the Wikipedia :-)

  21. Migs

    March 6th, 2006 at 9:28 am

    Microsoft already has a product called Microsoft Office Live Communications Server.

    Confusing.

  22. holypanl

    March 23rd, 2006 at 10:09 am

    I love Microsoft…
    I’m a 14 year old kid, looking for good free hosting, living in a 3rd world country. This helps a lot.

    I don’t care what conspiracies that old owl Bill Gates is thinking up, but it serves me well.

  23. Nadsy

    July 18th, 2006 at 11:59 am

    Hi Adam,

    Here is another competitor to Office and WebOffice. OfficeGateway…www.officegateway.ca I have heard they are looking into integrating a number of features with their product as well - a web drive, more of a web 2.0 interface, Ajax in it’s portlets and integration with a web word processors. Should be interesting to see.

  24. ade350

    July 18th, 2006 at 12:09 pm

    Hey,

    OfficeGateway is a great product for anyone looking to collaborate on a daily basis with their team. Shared calendars, Document Library and a great CRM piece.

    Affordable and solid, check it out!

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