Microsoft Office Live Offers Free Web hosting & Domain Name
A little over a month ago (Feb 2008), Microsoft started offering free web hosting service and custom domain name (1st year free) that in my opinion rivals other free web hosting providers who usually focus on personal websites and not businesses or organization. With OLSB you get a lot for FREE not offered any where such as event calendars, wikis, forums, survey builder, form builder, and more...
Office Live Small Business (OLSB) and Workspaces are built on the Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) engine. Although a very customized version of WSS, nonetheless OLSB has a very powerful set of tools for collaborating and managing your content online. Essentially, giving your business a front-end public website and password protected extranet site for employees, vendors, and/or partners.
I often run into small businesses who talk about the cost of running their website and find it very costly to pay for web hosting especially when they don't have the tools nor the knowledge to update their website. Often resorting to paying a person like me to update the content. My recommendation to them is to 1) look into a web hosting provider that will support web content management for a reasonable cost. This will one alleviate the costs associated with paying a web professional to update the content on your site. 2) find a web hosting provider or associate that will provide good support and training to help you enhance your website.
Office Live is very promising and you can't beat FREE! The only issue now is the training factor. OLSB is a very robust and great tool overall but I must admit the concept of workspaces, lists, wikis, and libraries are foreign to many. Therefore, I hope to fill the gap by providing free on-demand tutorials as well as real-time training on these topics in the near future via my Tutorials Live site.
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