February 22, 2006 Review: Office Live Beta Puts SOHOs Online Creating A Business Site By Rick Scott Courtesy of Page 2 of 4 Creating A Business Site Using Office Live, I created a sample site and, despite the editing limitations, and having to accept default formatting, I was satisfied with the results. I wasn't happy with ceding control to Office Live for default formatting for example, you can’t control column widths because it’s all automatic but the program does help ensure your site will be consistent across pages. (In the Office Live Essentials version, you can replace the editor with FrontPage.) Office Live Basics allows Web novices to put together a professional-looking site quickly and easily. Click image to enlarge. You can use your own images (such as a logo) after importing them to an Image Library. The Basics version allows you to store 30MB of text and graphics for your site (for Essentials that jumps to 50MB). Additional storage can be purchased in 50MB increments. Bandwidth is a respectable 10GB/month (Basics) or 25GB/month (Essentials); you can purchase an additional 25GB/month blocks. Not having to deal with settings and programs to update a site should come as a big relief to small business owners. While many Web-building applications make it as easy as possible for novices to build a site and get it online, Office Live takes care of everything, from the domain name registration to the Web design. Just click some buttons, edit some text, and watch it magically appear on line. Coupled with a feature that offers daily backup (and easy restore) and an extensive array of activity reports (such as number of visitors and top pages visited), Office Live Basics and Essentials offer a simple turnkey solution for building a small business Web site. You certainly can’t beat the price. The Basics version includes five e-mail accounts for your chosen domain; messages are read and created from (what else?) Hotmail. Attachments are limited to 10MB, and you can store up to 2GB of messages. With Essentials you get 50 e-mail accounts: attachments can be as large as 20MB, and you can access a mailbox from Hotmail, Outlook, and Outlook Express. Extra groups of five e-mail accounts can be purchased for either version; Collaboration offers no e-mail accounts. E-mail This Story Print This Story Page 3: Essentials: Collaboration Is Key Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Get the latest Messaging news, product info, and trends every week.			Pump Up the Online Jam Linux Web Conferencing: Share And Share Alike? Analysis: AOL Teams With WebEx For Enterprise IM Office 2007 To Feature New Workflow, Collaboration Tools Yahoo Adds Features To Firefox Toolbar Gordano Updates Messaging Suite With SNMP Links     Messaging Pipeline's Main RSS Feed     Messaging Pipeline's Blog RSS Feed Editorial and vendor perspectives The Six Flavors Of Windows Vista Microsoft plans to release a full six-pack of Vista versions, one for every taste. Which Vista will be right for you? Hope is Not Enough When It Comes To Compliance Three Ways To Authenticate E-Mail And Stop Spam Wikis In The Workplace Review: Google Desktop 3 Vendors are now talking about how collaboration can be improved by integrating video with messaging applications. They're even talking about adding live TV to mobile phones. How far do you go before it becomes a bandwidth and business productivity drain? Video is a great idea     13% Video is fine but there needs to be size limits     25% It's never used for anything really productive     38% I draw the line at live TV     25% In search of messaging products? Check out our brand new Product Finder for a directory of groupware and collaboration tools, security products, archiving solutions, and more.