Get all your emails in one place, create a shared workspace for online collaboration, bolster your firm's marketing - all with Microsoft Office Live. Small law firms will benefit from the web-hosting and collaboration tools, whilst larger firms can use it for client-specific collaborations.

I stumbled onto Microsoft Office Live when I clicked on a link that I thought would bring me to Office Online. Despite the similarity in names, Office Live is quite different than the Office Online site, which provides access to resources and templates for the Microsoft Office Suite.

Office Live is a web-hosting service, or at least that's what I thought at first. When I looked into it in more detail, I realized that it is packed full of goodies that take it well beyond traditional web hosting, but at a price that is competitive with many basic web-hosting services. There is a free version called Office Live Basics, an Essentials version for about $20 per month and a Premium version for about $40 per month. All three services are built around Microsoft's SharePoint Services and provide a free domain name, web-hosting, web design tools, at least 500 MB of web-hosting storage space, a minimum of 25 domain-specific email accounts (each with 2 GB of storage), website reports and more. The paid versions offer more storage space (1 GB or 2 GB respectively), 50 email accounts, additional business applications, and workspace-sharing features. Additional storage or email accounts can be purchased at a reasonable cost. The email accounts are HotMail accounts but are presented with an Office Live interface. I could, however, do with a few less steps to log in and check the email Inbox. The Inbox should be displayed by default when I click on the Email button, but it takes two additional clicks to get there.

At the time of writing, Office Live is available in the US, but not in Canada. Hopefully, that will change soon. I signed up initially for a 30 day Trial of Office Live Essentials, but soon opted to upgrade to the paid version in order to take advantage of an integration feature with Office Outlook, which I'll describe later.

As part of the sign-up process, it asked me what domain name I wanted. I tried backdraft.com and was told it was unavailable, but it approved backdraftsystems.com instantaneously. I was told that the domain would be active within a few hours, but that I could immediately begin designing my website. It also set up my initial email account and I easily created additional email accounts from the Office Live dashboard.

I was able to create a simple website in an evening by accessing their web design tools from my browser. I chose from a wide variety of predefined templates (based on SharePoint) and color options. It was easy to begin typing text into pre-defined areas of the templates and create a Home, Products and Services, About Us, and Contact Us page. It generates a Site Map page for you automatically. It was nice to be able to do all this without having to use any HTML or to have to download or install web design software to my desktop. No need to design your website in one place and upload it to a server. Any changes that are made are instantaneously available on the site.

I tried to create a FAQ using their FAQ template, but ran into some problems. Their tech support indicated that it was a known bug, so I created my FAQ inside Word with hyperlinks, saved it to HTML format, and uploaded that to the website. When I upgraded from the Trial to Essentials, the style sheet and colors for the website reverted to the defaults and I had to re-apply them – again tech support acknowledged that that should not have happened. It only took a few minutes to fix the problem once I realized what was going on.

For fun, I also created an animated logo for my site and was able to upload the logo and insert it on the web pages easily. The same would be true for any photographs or images in standard web image formats such as gif, jpg, png, etc.

Having my website up and running virtually overnight was cool enough, but it is the additional features of Office Live that really make the paid version worthwhile.

If you subscribe to a paid version, you can download software called Outlook Connector. This software synchronizes your email, calendar and contacts in Office Live with desktop Outlook. I was supposed to be able to get this to work while on the Office Live Essentials 30 day trial, but it didn't work until I waived the remainder of my free trial and paid for the first month of Office Live Essentials. The synchronization works fairly well. I was able to copy contacts into the Office Live Contacts folder so that they are accessible online while I'm out of the office and I could receive email from the Office Live email account inside Outlook along with emails to my prior email address. I haven't tried synchronizing calendar entries yet, but that could be a nice feature. There are two hassles with Outlook Connector:

1. If I leave items in the Inbox for more than a day, they end up being duplicated in Outlook (though they still appear only once in the Office Live Inbox), so I have to clean up some extra copies of emails occasionally.
2. If I use Outlook to send emails, every few days it asks me to sign on to the Office Live email account and verify my account (to prevent users sending SPAM from the account).

I'll live with the hassles, because I find it so valuable to have all my emails in one place.

The killer feature of Office Live, for me, is the ability to create online Workspaces that allow me to collaborate with others. There are several templates for workspaces including:

1. Four types of Meeting Workspaces with tabs such Agenda, Attendees, Document Library, Tasks and Objectives.
2. A Customer Workspace with features for Announcements, Calendar, Links and Shared Documents.
3. A Wiki Workspace.
4. A Team Workspace (which I describe below).

I set up a Team Workspace and granted permission to 3 other people to log onto the secure, private workspace. In the workspace dashboard, there is a tab for Team Discussion which maintains a bulletin-board-like threaded discussion service, a Shared Documents tab for uploading documents of any type for review/sharing, and tabs for Tasks, Calendar, Announcements and Links. It has been an effective tool for brainstorming and posting shared comments or documents. The process for them to log in was initially a little cumbersome, but once that has been completed, users can bookmark the login screen for subsequent logins. You can create as many workspaces as you wish around different projects and create permissions for each workspace. You are provided with 10 free user accounts that can belong to any workspace (different from the 50 email accounts). If you need more workspace user accounts, you can purchase 5- packs of additional users for about $12 per month.

For a law firm, the Workspace feature could be used to set up a client extranet around a specific case or groups of cases. You and your clients can post and collaborate around drafts of documents, evidence and other files and hold discussions, share calendars, etc. You can create a workspace that just uses the calendar feature to manage booking of meeting rooms and boardrooms. You can upload files so that you can access them from another machine later (say from home rather than at work). You can pay substantially more for extranet software that gives similar features.

The administration of the website is fully accessible on-line through well-designed menus that allow you to add users and set permissions, manage your website, and create and manage workspaces. There is an excellent set of website usage reports and statistics that allow you to track visitors to the site. I'm not sure what their definition for a unique visitor is though, because I hit numerous pages while testing my site and each one was considered a unique visitor.

Business Contact Manager is a feature in Office Live that allows you to store and track information about potential clients online.

They have a section in Office Live that shows you how to set up keywords that increase the chance that a search engine will show your site in the results. They also include a beta version of a product called Office Live AdManager, which guides you through setting up ads and determining the fee you are prepared to pay to users who click through the ad. I also downloaded a free copy of Office Accounting 2007 Express, which is great for a small business like mine, although not suitable for legal trust accounting.

Office Live has a link to a page that advises that the three most important marketing pieces for a business are your business card, a brochure and your website. Office Live does an excellent job of allowing you to easily host and maintain your website while providing exceptional collaboration features. I'm sure the kinks will be worked out over time (it's still in beta in some jurisdictions). In the meantime, I believe that Office Live is an ideal tool for web-hosting and collaboration for solo and small law firms. Larger firms may consider using it for client-specific collaborations even if their main site is hosted elsewhere.