MS Office Live free Website, Contact Manager, Emailer, Workspaces – What's the Catch?

Writing about web page http://www.microsoft.com/uk/smallbusiness/products/office-live/evaluate.mspx

Since I first created a website hosted on Microsoft’s Office Live Small Business online applications platform, last week, their whole offering has been changed. All the applications such as their contact manager, a simple to use CRM system, team workspaces, project management tools, email and newsletter management have been popping up to enable free of charge. So what is the catch? Their evaluate page, above, shows that you now pay for additional users and space.

• 500MB for your website.
• 100MB for photos.
• 100 x Live Hotmail email accounts with 10 MB storage.
• 5 users who can use collaborative tools.
• 50 MB of project storage.
• 200 free emails per month with their e-mailer whilst in Beta. (Till the end of April 2008.)

The number of users is the first obvious limit.
If up to 15 team members were to use this seriously you should probably have a contract and some support.

The really tight limit appears to be the 50MB project space. Not a problem for spreadsheets and text documents but your powerpoint files could eat this up quickly!

Still I do not think anyone can quibble about this extermely professional package that has been assembled by Microsoft for Small Businesses. Microsoft may be the new IBM but this package could make the SME space theirs.

Robert McGonigle : 05 Mar 2008 17:15 |  Tags: Collaboration Workspaces Crm Emailers Web Applications |  Comments (1) |  Report a problem