Office Live Small Business Updated

Office Live Small Business (formerly Office Live), a set of online services for small businesses, has been overhauled to appeal to very small businesses that lack a Web site. A new pricing model offers many more features for free, and business owners can get more sophisticated Web sites, including e-commerce features and marketing assistance. The overhaul, which also added support for the Firefox browser, suggests that the subscription tiers of the original service were not finding many customers, although some of those features may find their way into Microsoft Online, a planned set of services for larger businesses.

Aiming Lower

Office Live Small Business is the new name for Office Live, a set of communication and collaboration services for small businesses that launched in Dec. 2006 after nearly a year of public beta testing. It was rebranded in Oct. 2007 when Microsoft began beta-testing Office Live Workspace, a separate service that provides an online space for users to store, edit, and share information, including Office documents and other types of files. (For background on Office Live Workspace, see “Free Online Collaboration Service Planned” on page 31 of the Nov. 2007 Update.)