Regular readers of this column will be aware of Mrs. Ferry's limited grasp of technology, so she of course immediately turned to her in-house IT provider. However, as a busy executive at the cutting edge of high-tech, I am of course too busy cutting million dollar deals and mixing with captains of industry to do anything as mundane as set up a website or register an email domain. As for backing up files in case the kids knock a glass of milk over the laptop  - completely out of the question.

It has therefore been interesting to help Mrs. Ferry start a new business over the past year or so. The Kurekodu property business, like most microbusinesses, needed

  • a website to attract and inform potential clients, and give the feel of a well-run and professional outfit
  • a "corporate sounding" URL and email address....(e.g. CHiefExecutive@WeAreABigReputableCompany.COM style)
  • somewhere safe to store all the invoices, marketing and financial business documents being generated

So Office Live was a means to obtain a professional result with the minimum of time invested. Office Live lets one-man-bands and microbusiness get online in a matter of minutes, with a minimum of IT savvy required. It's going live on May 23rd, although already there are around 1800 Scottish businesses online with Office Live websites. (Including the highly informative and successful Just Winches site - if you find yourself in need of a winch, that's the place to go)

This "quick and easy" appeal has been borne out by the Kurekodu experience. After registering for the Office Live Premium service, the Kurekodu website was up and running within 2 hours, built using the Office Live Web Designer. This is a simple, elegant AJAX browser based application, which lets business owners define a simple theme and navigation for their site, and create a basic set of professional looking pages. That is a real boon for the small business owner, whom without the luxury of an IT department, would normally have to pay for a web designer to do this, and understand the more arcane aspects of registering domain names etc.

Even the non-techno-savvy Mrs. Ferry regularly uses this application to modify the property for sale web page when Kurekodu offers a new property for sale or rent. The Web Designer also let her quickly "sex up" the website, with animated picture galleries and simple web forms which send an alert email when a customer makes a web enquiry.

She was also delighted to purchase further domains (making the site available over kurekodu.co.uk, kurekodu.com and houseinestonia.com) addresses to make the site easier to find, and having registered on Google and Windows Live Search engines, is building up the site to make it top of the pops for likely internet searches.

However, apart from the ease of establishing an effective internet shop front, the most dramatically useful aspects of Office Live have been its business applications.

Office Live gives businesses not only a public-facing website, but also supports secure workspaces for documents, contacts, lists, photos  - indeed any kind of business information. Kurekodu's MD (the technophobe Mrs. Ferry) and her associates in Estonia use this to collaboratively create particulars for properties for sale, and to build invoices for the companies' services. These are all secured using Windows Live ID (formerly passport) and kept up on the Kurekodu private site where they are safe, backed up, without the version confusion caused by email tennis.

What's more, these important business documents can be shared securely with customers (indeed anybody signed up for a Windows Live ID), so they can track service charges for their investments under Kurekodu's management. That's a secure extranet collaboration solution delivered at a miniscule IT cost.

But Office Live Business Applications are the really exciting area for small businesses. These make available powerful business tools to the small business previously available only to companies with £10,000s a year to spend on IT. Kurekodu runs a simple Accounting application on Office Live, to maintain profit/loss account for each property investment, or client property under management. Its by no means a complex application, but is customised to the company's business niche, is an online, hosted application and hence available to all staff regardless of where they are based, and works offline through its integration with Access 2007. Currently Kurekodu's hard working IT Director (yours truly) is building a Reporting application so that the MD can be kept properly informed of the profitability of each customer and property investment.

As Office Live is built on the Windows Sharepoint Services 2007 platform, these powerful business application capabilities will come as no surprise to any of Microsoft's Business Partners. Many are already building Office Live solutions to take their applications downstream and target smaller business customers, such as Solution Canvas with Justia , whom I blogged about a while back. Such industry-focused applications used to automate business processes without having any nasty servers or difficult software applications to install, made available by subscription, are very attractive to small businesses with no time or funds to invest in an overly complex IT strategy.

Clearly for any Small business IT company Office Live and services like it cannot be ignored. Despite its limitations today, for many small businesses this is enough to support business functions with the minimum of fuss. Clearly its a case of Office Live or Die...