Followers of the Trumpet know of my missionary zeal for Office Live. This at-a-stroke solution to web site and business applications for small businesses on blog and has won a strong following amongst Scotland's SME's with around 3500 sign-ups as of January.

My interest was initially driven by the vested interest of getting Mrs. Ferry's property business Kurekodu online. At the cost of a few hours effort I banged up a reasonable looking website to drive a healthy supply of web sales leads and a extranet to drive customer billing more efficiently. I quickly realised that the proposition is unbeatable - a free domain, company email and  a simpleton website editor giving smart looking site within hours all for nowt.

The proposition has further improved since February's rename to Office Live Small Business.

As well as an easing of the signup process (punters can now sign up without having to enter a credit card or decide on a domain name) this heralded a significant rework of the Office Live Web designer. The upgrade makes the web design process more flexible for the partner (who can switch on the advanced web design features which might be scary for the small biz punter) but keeps things simple for the non-technical user with an Office-style user interface.

Integrated advertising, email marketing and comprehensive analytics make it possible for the Office Live platform to be a serious web channel for the on-line business. Take-up of OLSB by small companies needing a professional looking website is accelerating, look at www.justwinches.co.uk and  as well as web phenomenon www.kurekodu.co.uk .

However, there is evidence that most would rather have a web artist do if for them - so its Do It For Me rather than DIY. Several web design companies have launched services targeting Office Live website design, including fixed price web design and support packages including  Coderight (with a bunch of custom templates, and ChooBoo Live who build the whole thing for you and charge ongoing support for changes and other value adds.

In Scotland business startups increased 5.3% last year. Many are the smallest sole trader/small businesses not VAT or PAYE registered for whom this kind of web-in-a-box service is most relevant. There are estimated to be 277,000 of these in Scotland so 3500 Scottish subscribers is significant for this technology-shy sector.

Office Live Small Business includes a number of useful business applications. These have been enhanced in v2, with the simple Contact Manager perhaps the most useful - to share contacts amongst employees. As the small business builds its clientele, these contacts can be used to drive the closed loop email marketing feature. Leads can enter their details through the public website using an integrated "Contact me" form. This example of web front end/business app back end integration showcases the Forms Designer/List Publisher aspect of Office Live Small Business - its simple to publish forms on the website which drive business applications at the back end - likewise its easy to publish data to the public website. Previously such web site functionality would require custom development which is out of the reach of most small businesses.

Writing powerful business applications which take advantage of the Office Live public website and back office SharePoint platform is the larger opportunity for partners. This is "cloud computing" for the small business. Crafty web developers can build powerful applications by mashing Sharepoint's data with their own and 3rd party web services. 

Many Microsoft partners are making a very good living building on the SharePoint platform. Office Live Small business is an opportunity to package those skills and offer them at scale to small businesses. In response to demand from partners, the Office Live team have included a solution packager in v2 - this allows a partner to package up all solution elements including public website templates, business applications (including data schema in the form of SharePoint lists, business logic in SharePoint workflow, etc) and provision these to a new customer's office live subscription.

For the full lowdown on Office Live v2 a good resource is the reviewers guide - further insight from Chris's Unofficial Office Live page and from Darren Johnston, Solution Canvas ace developer of Justia who promises he will start blogging about Office Live again just as soon as he is a bit less busy.