February 22, 2006 Review: Office Live Beta Puts SOHOs Online Essentials: Collaboration Is Key By Rick Scott Courtesy of Page 3 of 4 Essentials: Collaboration Is Key Essentials includes all the Web-building tools of Basics, then adds a collection of tools called Business Applications, including Contact Manager, Sales, Projects, Employee, and Calendar. These tools help you track companies and customers, manage project deadlines, store sales information, manage key employee data, and build a company calendar of events. Some information is shared among the applications you can assign a customer to a project or assign a task to-do list item to an employee. (The Collaboration version includes the same Business Applications collection.) The applications are extensively customizable. For example, the Customer Manager is perfectly adequate as is, but you can add your own fields, rearrange the field order on the data entry screen, select which data you wanted to see (and save those custom views for repeated viewing), and view or edit data one record at a time or in a columnar grid. The applications provide a one-way data exchange with Office applications: You can export data to Excel or Access, build a Pivot Table report, or create a chart in Excel. Sadly, there’s no import feature. There are five major applications: Businesses will probably depend most on Contact Manager, which lets you set up Accounts (that is, companies) and their Business Contacts (people), tracking the basics such as addresses, phone numbers, and freeform notes. The Contact Manager is one of the most effective tools in Office Live Collaboration. Click image to enlarge. The Sales application lets you manage marketing collateral (product spec sheets, company overviews, and the like) in one place. The Projects component lets you track all your Project tasks, milestones, and deadlines. The Employee application is a lot less robust. Its core component, which stores employee facts such as name and title, is reasonably useful, but the Training, Expense reporting, and Working Hours components are so underpowered or bafflingly tedious that I can’t recommend them. For example, Training keeps track of training classes and who enrolled, but not who completed them, so it’s not very useful in the real world. The Calendar application lets you display a company calendar and an overview of data from Business Applications a list of project milestones, for example. Because there is no integration between the calendar and the Project information, dates from the applications (such as milestone due dates) don’t flow to the calendar, which reduces its usefulness considerably. Essentials comes with a license for 10 users; you can buy additional five-packs. Storage space is limited to 50MB. Security is limited: You can assign a user to be an Administrator (to set up other accounts), Editor (to view and update information), or Reader (viewing rights only) but only for all Business Applications as a whole. By accessing applications online rather than running from your hard drive, you’re likely to experience slight delays between the time you press the Enter key and when your screen is refreshed. That’s the trade-off of using software as a service. The big benefit: Updated information is immediately available to your co-workers. E-mail This Story Print This Story Page 4: Shared Sites Stumbles 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.