The much-awaited Office
Live was released today in beta. There are three levels:
Office Live
Basics
free
Office Live Collaboration
starting at $29.95
Office Live
Essentials starting
at $29.95
Check out the home page for a quick summary. The Office Live Basics is
always free, while Collaboration and Essentials are free only during beta
testing. Count on some advertising in return on all your pages (I assume).
One can only hope it’s not the mini-Las Vegas lights approach you see at
MSN.com.
Office Live is a collection of services to run your business online,
including domain names, email addresses, office document creation,
databasing and spreadsheet-type applications. It’s not a replacement for MS
Office. It’s more like a highly focused application subset running on a
server that you can pick up and use immediately at nominal cost for
ownership and maintenance.
I’m curious to learn more. We all expected Google to be the first to the
market with some kind of web-based office production. Well, we haven’t heard
from Google yet, though you have to figure they have something up their
sleeve in this area.
I was not able to see if the Office Live products included RSS support. I
had to create an account first, which requires a .net login and all that
goes with that. Oh, joy! More forms and questionnaires!
And here is the kicker: After I spent time creating an account to simply
try it out, I was told, “If you are selected as a beta participant, you will
receive your e-mail invitation and unique product key in 2-4 weeks.”
No bingo.
Tom
