Every popular web platform has concept of themes: something you can simply add to your web site and change its look-and-feel instantly. Themes usually contain hooks to style a web site's headers, footers, and navigation elements automatically. In addition, themes contain a style sheet that applies across the site as well as a specific styles for certain commonly-found pages or elements.
Although Office Live Small Business doesn't have a theming engine, it's possible to design themes for the platform using Advanced Design Features and tables in the Business Applications database. I've played around with the idea and it seems to work pretty well. I've even ported the popular NonZero theme (which I ported to BlogEngine.Net for this web site as well, incidentally) for my own OLSB web site at acxede.com. More...
Simon Witkiss wrote saying that Office Live's Site Navigation Links show an underline inconsistently when you hover over them. If you've already visited the link, you don't see the underline, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Visited links don't show an underline
On the other hand, if you've never visted the site, the underline is displayed, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Links not already visited show an underline
While it's not a showstopper, it's certainly an irritant. Simon posted a fix in a comment, but here it is again as an official tip, with accompanying figures. Add the following style to your style sheet:
.MSC_PrimaryNavLink:visited:hover
{
color:#ffffff;
font-size:12px;
text-decoration:underline;
}
Thanks, Simon!
For the last month or so, the e-mails that Office Live Small Business generates whenever someone fills out a Contact Us form have the following (or similar) tip at the bottom:
You can automatically save incoming messages and customer contact information by activating your Contact Manager. Activate today: http://home.officelive.com/settings/pages/inprogress.aspx?pkey=BCM&ctag=PrivateSite&purl=%23root%23%2FWebBCM%2Fdefault.aspx&pguid=Home.BCM.
Sincerely,
Your Microsoft Office Live Small Business Team
Granted, it's helpful. But the problem is that whenever I reply to that message, it confuses the hell out of the person reading the reply because he thinks His Microsoft Office Live Small Business Team was somehow involved in this exchange.
I'd be grateful if Office Live Small Business stops appending these tips.
Building a new web site with Office Live Small Business? Follow these tips to make it friendly to search engines:
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Use Office Live's Built-in Site Name and Site Slogan instead of creating images for them. When you do so, Office Live renders them as <h3> and <h5> tags, which search engines attach importance to. If you use the custom header module, Office Live makes the values of these fields available in the xsl style sheets. Use those values if you can. If you can't (or don't want to) add your own <h3> and <h5> tags.
More...
The Office Live Small Business family of services and its history are bursting at the seams with naming foul-ups. Several of Microsoft's other products sound suspiciously similar to Office Live Small Business or one of its features. Consequently, here's a list of what Office Live Small Business is NOT:
Office Live Small Business began its life as Office Live – without the Small Business. Because it came soon after Google's Docs and Spreadsheets, everyone assumed Office Live was an online version of the ubiquitous Microsoft Office prompting someone to muse whether Microsoft Office would now be re-christened Office Dead. For the record, Office Live is not, and never was, an online version of Microsoft Office.
The subscription editions of Office Live include a rudimentary CRM application called Business Contact Manager, which sounded suspiciously like Microsoft Outlook Business Contact Manager, a desktop add-on to Microsoft Outlook in the Office suite. Incidentally, the two Business Contact Mangers are not directly related.
The subscription editions also include Workspaces, which many thought were related to the Workspaces in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. This time they were right, more or less, but as it turned out, Office Live's Workspaces couldn't interact with Microsoft Office applications. Both kinds of Workspaces are indeed SharePoint-based, but aren't related.
Microsoft has an online resource center for Microsoft Office users (http://office.microsoft.com), where they can get tips on using the suite, download updates and resources, and ask for help. It's called, of all things, Office Online. By now you can guess that it too has nothing to do with Office Live. To add to this nomenclature mess, Windows Live, the re-branded MSN with a slew of new services, was launched around the same time. The Live in their names led many to believe that Office Live had something to do with Windows Live, which it doesn’t.
Just when it finally dawned on people what exactly Office Live was, Microsoft decided to re-brand it as Office Live Small Business, in October 2007.
By the way, Office Live Small Business has nothing to do with Microsoft Office 2007 Small Business Edition, which is the small-business-specific edition of Microsoft Office 2007 and gets its name because it includes the by-now-infamous Microsoft Outlook Business Contact Manager add-on – which, as you now know, is no relation to Office Live Small Business’s Business Contact Manager application.
Why the re-branding, you ask? Because Microsoft has introduced a brand new service which lets you collaborate with Microsoft Office documents online as long as you have the Microsoft Office Suite on your desktop. This new service is called Office Live Workspaces, which has no relation to the Workspaces in Office Live Small Business, which in turn has no relation to the Workspaces in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Got that? Good.