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Microsoft Office Live Small Business update

Upgraded features and lower price nice, but options abound.

By James E. Gaskin, Network World, 02/21/08

Microsoft claims nearly 600,000 small businesses have hosted their Web sites on Office Live Small Business since March 2006. To keep that momentum going, Microsoft updated features and dropped prices on Feb. 11.

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Office Live is a misleading name because people naturally assume the service has something to do with Microsoft Office. It doesn’t. This is a Web hosting service and this latest update makes basic Web sites free and includes some free tools that used to cost extra. The basic package includes 100 e-mail accounts, a site design tool, free online applications, and free domain registration for one year (a savings of about $10). The custom domain name and business e-mail service costs $14.95 after the first year.

Handy features include Store Manager, which makes it easy to post products for sale on the Microsoft hosted site and, with a couple of extra clicks, eBay at the same time. An e-mail marketing beta program makes it easier for businesses to flood inboxes, so I hope Microsoft explains the rules of the CAN-SPAM law in the instructions.

Extra cost options (but with some discounts for the first year) include the AdManager search marketing tool and Store Manger for e-commerce. Microsoft pushes payment processing off to PayPal, although Payment Card Industry (PCI) security rules still apply if the businesses handle any credit card information directly.

Microsoft says Macintosh clients can now get involved by running the newly support Firefox browser Version 2.0. Interestingly, when I tested the Office Live sign-up process, I could move forward using Firefox running on XP, but not the same version of Firefox running on Ubuntu Linux Version 7.10.

While this all sounds nice, small businesses have literally thousands of Web hosting options. They aren't free, but they have more flexibility for add in products such as e-commerce services.

Yahoo just announced its small businesses hosting sites now come with unlimited disk space, unlimited e-mail accounts and storage, and unlimited traffic bandwidth. They cost $11.95 per month, which is actually high for those features.