Packt Publishing published my second book, Microsoft Office Live Small Business: Beginner's Guide, today.
Part of Packt’s Beginner’s Guide Series, the book offers step-by-step instructions for building a small-business web site from scratch with Office Live Small Business. It emphasizes web design fundamentals and best practices along the way. It's packed with tips, tricks, and hacks for building an effective, user-friendly, easily findable, and highly usable web site in next-to-no-time.
The book's companion web site is at www.officeliveguide.com.
Packt Publishing will be publishing my second book, Microsoft Office Live Small Business: Beginner's Guide, in November 2009.
Part of Packt’s Beginner’s Guide Series, the book will offer step-by-step instructions for building a small-business web site with Office Live Small Business. It will emphasizes web design fundamentals and best practices along the way.
In the book, I'll build a web site from scratch. The site, www.officeliveguide.com, will also serve as the book's companion site.
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...
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.
Office Live Workspace is an online repository for storing, sharing, and collaborating on documents. It can hold three kinds of documents:
- Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) documents
- Task, event or contact lists, or even custom lists with custom columns, that you can build right within your workspace
- Ad-hoc notes created with a built-in Wordpad-like application called Notes
Before you start comparing Office Live Workspace to Google Docs, let me tell you that you can’t create Office documents with Office Live Workspace – you’ll need Microsoft Office on your computer. But once that requirement is satisfied, you’ll be able to work with Office Live Workspace seamlessly. Figure 1 shows what your Workspace looks like when you first sign in. You can consider it to be the Workspace home page.
Figure 1: Office Live Workspace Home Page
The left navigation bar in Figure 1 shows three top-level items:
- My Workspaces
- Shared With Me
- Deleted Items
The My Workspaces section lists the workspaces you create yourself. Although the name of the service is Office Live Workspace, a singular, you can create as many workspaces as you want. One called Docuements is already created for you and you can see it under My Workspaces.
The Shared With Me section lists documents that others create in their Workspace and share them with you. The Deleted Items section lists the documets you’ve deleted. It’s the recycle bin for your Workspace and you can recover deleted documents from it if you change your mind.
In the next part of this tutorial I’ll start with showing you what you can do with the simples of documents – a note. But keep in mind that all other types of documents in Office Live Workspace come with the same functionality.
Creating a Note
To create a new note, pull down the New menu on the blue navigation bar across the top and click Note. You’ll see a Wordpad-like editor as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Creating Notes with Office Live Workspace
A note has a title, which is automatically filled in for you. You can replace it with one of your choice. You can also enter a dwscription for it by clicking on the Click here to type a description field and entering a description. Then you pretty much create a note as you would in Wordpad. My note is shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: My first note
Of course, you can use all the font and text customizations available in the toolbar at the top. When you’re done, click the save icon (the little floppy disk before the font picker). Click Close on the Ribbon to close the note. Office Live Workspace closes the note and takes you back to the dashboard of the Documents workspace. The dashboard of a workspace shows you a list of all documents in it and allows you to manipulate individual documents. (See Figure 4.)
Figure 4: The Document Workspace dashboard showing the document in it
Editing a Note and Saving Versions
Let’s edit the note you just created. To do so, click on the name of the note on the dashboard. The note opens up. You can’t edit it yet; it’s in Read Only mode. Before you edit it, let’s save this version of the note. Click Versions on the Ribbon and choose Save to Version Histroy. Now click Edit on the Ribbon. The note opens in the Notes Editor. Change the text a bit and save the note. My note now looks like the one shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5: An edited version of the note
Let’s save this version as another version of the note. Click Versions on the Ribbon and choose Save to Version Histroy. Office Live Workspace saves this version as well. Then pull down the Versions menu one more time. It will show both versions of your document as shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6: Two versions of my document. One was saved 5 minutes ago and the other at 1:28 AM.
You’re presently editing the version that’s grayed out (in figure 1, it’s the version saved at 1:28 AM). You can save up to 8 version of a document. If you thoroughly messed up your document before the last save, you can restore from any of the previous versions. To do so click the version, on the Versions pull-down menu, that you want to restrore from. It opens up as shown in Figure 7.
Figure 7: Restoring from an older version
If you want to restore from this version, click Restore on the Ribbon. Office Live Workspace asks you to confirm that you really, really want to do so. Click OK. The text in the present version rolls back to that of the version you restored from.
Sharing a Note
To share a note with someone else, click the link for the note from the dashboard. The note comes up in read-only mode. Pull down the Share menu and click Share Document. A new pane that looks like a mini e-mail message appears at the top of the note as shown in Figure 8.
Figure 8: Sharing your note
You can share your document in two ways. You can allow people to edit it or you can restrict them to simply viewing it. There is a separate text box for each kind of users. Type e-mail addresses of all people that you want to let edit your document in the Editors box. Similarly, if there are people to whom you want to give a read-only access to your document, type their names in the Viewers box. Then type a message to let them know what you want them to do with your document. Click OK to send the message.
The mini e-mail pane closes and your note now shows the people you’ve shared it with, as shown in Figure 9.
Figure 9: Details of people you’re sharing this note with
If you’d like to alter the list of people, click the downword pointing arrows that look like Chevron’s logo below the Close icon. The pane expands to revear a pair of buttons to edit the list.
Adding Comments to Notes
You, or people you’re sharing your document with, can collaborate on the document by adding comments. To do so, click the Comment icon in the toolbar. A comment panel appears on the right-hand side of the document, as shown in Figure 10.
Figure 10: Collaborating with comments
Type the text of your comment and click Add Comment. You can expand the comment box by clicking the Expand link above it, or get rid of it if you change your mind by clicking the Close link.
To view the comments, click the Comment icon and all the related notes will be displayed as shown in Figure 11.
Figure 11: Viewing comments
That’s pretty much what you can do with Workspaces. For this tutorial, I’ve used the simplest of documents– a note. You can do all these things with all the lists you can build with Workspaces and Word, Excel, or Powerpoint documents as well.