Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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When I was a kid I went to a summer camp in upstate NY and at one point the camp bought a completely wild and untamed plot of land eight miles away which they called the “Outpost.” I was part of an unfortunate group of junior counselors who had to hike up and begin to make the Outpost habitable for the other campers, and eventually it became a great place to hike to for cookouts, overnights, social events and other “programs.”

The current beta version of Microsoft Office Live seems to be such an Outpost on the web for MS Office users.

I have looked into previous versions of Office Live in the past and found that they bore little if any resemblance to Office on the desktop and featured very little integration. Now you can use your Office applications to upload files to a Workspace or Small Business Office Live web site.

But still, unlike the Google apps which work in the browser there are no Office apps (as yet) inhabiting this “outpost” — you need to use your own desktop based apps to work with the documents on Office Live — it is the beginning of the presumed move to get Microsoft Office itself to live online as well as on an Intel or AMD machine.

If this sounds a bit familiar, like SharePoint or perhaps Groove — it is similar — but let’s take a look at what Microsoft has done to put a “live” Workspace or Small Business web site for Office online for its users.

When you sign up for a Small Business site you are greeted with a web page that kind of looks like SharePoint “light,” which is not surprising because that’s what the product is based on.

In the Get Started panel at the top you can immediately begin to customize your small business site, get a URL, or set up an email account.

Figure 1

Notice that there is also a link to download the Outlook Connector [link] that I covered last month. With the Outlook Connector installed, you can link your Office Live Small Business email to your Windows Live Hotmail account (and manage it from Outlook on your desktop).

Figure 2

With the connection properly set up, Outlook can send and receive email through your old account as well as Hotmail.

It appears that there are two ways to go. The way I did it, by setting up my Hotmail with the connector allows me to access it, along with my calendar and contacts through my Windows Live Hotmail account.

If you want separate email accounts, calendars and contact lists that live in Office Live and are specific to your small business presence, you can set them up by clicking the links in the Home Panel on the left of the Office Live browser window.

For example, clicking Contact Manager (instead of going to Hotmail contacts) brings up an online Contact Management application that you can use to enter, sort and access your contacts from directly within Office Live Small Business.

(At this point it seems like the only import option is to create a contact list as an Excel CSV file to upload into Contact Manager; so my preference would be to use the Hotmail Contacts unless my business were really sophisticated so that I could continue to manage my contacts (and calendar and email) using Outlook and the Outlook Connector.

Figure 3

So what about the Workspace aspect of Office Live?

When you click Share Documents under the Home Panel, you enter the true Office Live Workspace. (Sometimes it takes a few hours for this to actually come “live”; at least that’s what happened to me)

If you’ve ever explored SharePoint, Microsoft’s server based collaboration system, this will begin to look familiar. The key difference is that I’m accessing this workspace simply through my browser and I don’t need any server technology in place to connect or manage the environment.

Figure 4

If you click on New Workspace you see the types of workspaces that are available. Notice that what this represents is a business environment made for wider consumer appeal; i.e., for students and households. (For such users they could opt for only a Workspace and not an Office Live Small Business site when signing up).

Figure 5

You can begin by creating a new document that will “live” on the workspace by clicking New, and seeing a list of potential documents that can be created.

Figure 6

If I click to create a Word document, I get a warning message and then my desktop version of Word opens. I can begin to create a document normally for my workspace.

When I click Save I am prompted to reenter my log in information for my Workspace (which I can set to automatic).

Figure 7

Then I can name the document normally, and when I click Save, it is not saved locally but instead will be uploaded and stored in my workspace within my Office Live site.

Figure 8

With my new document residing in the workspace, I can click to select it, and either choose to share the document itself, or share my entire screen with other users.

Figure 9

If I choose to share the document, I get an email/message interface where I can circulate the newly created document to others who can view or edit the document depending upon granted permissions.

Figure 10

To share your screen you will need to install an application called Microsoft SharedView. SharedView lets you connect with up to 15 people in different locations and share, review, and update documents with multiple people in real time. You’ll need a Windows Live ID (Passport, Hotmail, or MSN) to start sessions (and you probably have one anyway if you’ve gotten this far with Office Live, but users don’t need a Windows Live ID just to join sessions.

So what exactly is the status of the Office Live Small Business site and workspace? It’s an interesting environment and very promising, with many of the features of SharePoint without the technical overhead and some of the more sophisticated features.

It is meant to appeal to a broader range of potential users: students, home businesses and others who simply want to share information in groups (like sports teams for example) without necessarily making it a business (begin with Workspace only) — or for small businesses with greater web ambitions who want to create an entire web site and presence with more sophisticated marketing applications online, again without needing SharePoint.

More important, it is a significant step in integrating desktop Office apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook with their online cousins in a meaningful way. So far it is mainly a storage and distribution point (outpost, if you will) but if Microsoft can make good on its expectations for Office 14 next year, we may see much more online functionality and the ability of Office users to create, review, share and distribute documents seamlessly online.

While Microsoft experiments and fine tunes the model it’s free in beta. Presumably that pricing model will also change at some point.

InformIT Articles and Sample Chapters

Microsoft Office Outlook Connector

Checking Out Office Live

Books and eBooks

Microsoft Office Live: Take Your Business Online (Safari Books Online)

Using Office Live (Digital Shortcut) (Read in Safari Books Online)

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