Microsoft Office Live Small Business recently launched new and updated features to its online Web service. The site provides free access to everything from a website and domain name to online document managers. Sure, it's not the first to offer free websites to small businesses but Microsoft has seemingly extended the amount of overall free service offerings to a pretty respectable level. New freelancers and consultants will certainly appreciate being able to set up a website with their own domain and up to 100 e-mail accounts.
The range of professional applications available at no cost is a real attention getter for small companies. For starters, there are online marketing tools available for sending your customers e-mailed newsletters and promotions (still in Beta phase), and search tools to help market your site to search engines. However, it's the other set of web-based applications that should be especially appealing to freelancers. These include an Contact Manager to track and respond to customer-related actions and an online Document Management solution that allow you to store documents and collaborate on documents over the Internet. Additionally, there is a project manager application and Workspaces collaboration application. Microsoft Office Live provides the following overview of these two popular features.
Project Manager: Plan, track, and update a project’s progress from one central, shared location; assign tasks to others and track progress towards milestones; easily sort and filter projects by a number of fields, including completed and active tasks, due date, assigned to, and more; and document and monitor issues that arise during a project.
Workspaces: Easily enable groups to review and edit documents by posting to a central online location accessible only to people you’ve granted access; allow employees, customers, and business partners to "pull" information and large files as needed rather than “push” information to them over e-mail; streamline the editing process by providing employees with an online space to review and collaborate on documents; and use pre-designed templates to create workspaces specifically for customers, workgroups, meetings, and wikis.
Have you used Microsoft Live Office Small Business? Let us know what you liked and what you thought was still missing in these feature sets.