Find answers to frequently asked questions about Office Live Small Business.
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About Office Live Small Business
Office Live Small Business provides everything you need to take, promote, and manage your business online. You can create a professional online presence for free—including a Web site, domain name, and business-branded e-mail—without the hassle or expense of buying a server, setting up a complicated infrastructure, or hiring technical staff to maintain it. Office Live Small Business is a hosted service—all you need is a computer and an Internet connection.
Office Live Small Business provides your company with everything needed to create a professional Web presence for free, including a domain name, easy-to-use Web site design and management tools, and 100 e-mail accounts. You also get a free suite of professional business applications that will allow you to manage customers, projects, and documents and easily share information with employees, customers, suppliers and vendors. All this is security-enhanced, managed, and maintained by Office Live Small Business.
You can also purchase additional services that help promote your business. adManager is a free tool that enables you buy, manage, and optimize keyword purchases on Ask Sponsored Listings network, and MSN and Live Search, two of the most popular destinations on the Web. Store Manager provides an easy and affordable way for you to sell products directly from your Web site as well as through eBay. And with the new e-mail marketing capability you can create newsletter campaigns to maintain and build deeper relationships with your customers.
Learn more about what’s included with Office Live Small Business services.
When you sign up for Office Live Small Business, you get a Web site, Web hosting and Web design tools, site traffic reports, a contact management system, and online business applications to help you manage your business—all for free! There are additional sales and marketing services you can get at affordable prices. See our
pricing details page for more information.
Yes. Office Live Small Business is currently available in the following languages and countries/regions: English (Canada, U.K., U.S.); French (Canada, France); German (Germany); and Japanese (Japan).
If you have a Store Manager account, the Shopping Cart and Checkout pages of your online store are encrypted using a 128 bit SSL certificate (Secure Socket Layer). We do not currently offer SSL (https://) for non Store Manager pages of your Office Live Small Business Web site.
A beta is a test version of a program or service that Microsoft asks users to try out for a period of time. Microsoft will use feedback from beta users to help improve the final version of the product that is released to market.
No. Our service does not provide the Microsoft Office suite as a subscription or hosted online offering. Office Live Small Business services offer small business owners/managers a company domain name, hosted Web site for marketing your business, e-mail, a password protected private Web site for sharing information with key contacts, and over 20 internet-based applications that can help you automate common business tasks such as management of customers, projects and documents.
These hosted applications will work independently to provide essential tools to automate your daily tasks; however, they will also seamlessly integrate with popular Microsoft products like Microsoft Office Outlook, Excel and Word.
Office Live Workspace is the online companion to Microsoft Office enabling individuals to store, access and share documents from anywhere. Office Live Small Business is a complete set of services that are designed to serve the needs of small businesses, which also includes the ability to store and share documents.
Domain names
A domain name points to a unique place on the Internet, a Web address, such as www.northwindtraders.com,where customers, clients, and vendors can find your business. Acquiring your business domain name is the first step to take in getting your business online. The domain name protects your business brand from competitors and also reserves a customized address for a future Web site or e-mail accounts.
It’s a way for you to keep your existing domain name (like www.adventure-works.com) and start using Office Live Small Business. Domain redelegation lets you tell your current domain registrar (the company responsible for your domain records) to associate your domain name with new Web site hosting and e-mail services.
Learn moreIf you have already created a Web site, just save all of your existing Web site files including pictures, sound files, and video clips to your computer. After you sign up for an Office Live Small Business account, you'll be able to easily transfer all your files to your new Web site. You can preview and make changes to your Web site until all your pages look exactly the way you want.
Once you redirect your domain to Office Live Small Business, you’ll need to recreate the e-mail accounts you had with your previous registrar in your new account. For example, if your domain name is northwindtraders.com and your e-mail address is jim@northwindtraders.com, then you can create this same account in your Office Live Small Business account. You may be able to access e-mail messages that were sent to your e-mail account with your previous domain registrar for a period of time after you move to Office Live Small Business.
We recommend that you save your messages, calendar items, and contact information either before redirecting your domain or immediately afterwards. Messages sent after you have created the new accounts will appear in your Office Live Small Business Inbox. You should be aware that some e-mail, however, sent after you requested the name server change (but before your site is moved and the new e-mail accounts set up) may be lost.
Whether or not you get charged to renew your domain name depends on the offer available when you signed up for your Office Live Small Business account. If you signed up before February 11, 2008 (for an Office Live Basics, Office Live Essentials, or Office Live Premium account) you will not be charged a renewal fee.
If you signed up on or after February 11, 2008, your domain name is free for the first year, then you will be charged $14.95 annually at renewal thereafter. Microsoft will automatically renew your domain name for you each year unless the domain name is canceled prior to the renewal date.
As a courtesy, Microsoft will notify you by e-mail before your domain name is renewed, asking you to check your domain name information and update it, if necessary.
If you redelegated (redirected) your domain name to Office Live Small Business from a different domain registrar, your domain name renewal and any associated fees will come from your original domain registrar, not Office Live Small Business.
The registrant information for all domain names is available in a public database (find out more by reading ICANN frequently asked questions), regardless of whom you registered your domain with. Because of this public availability, third-parties do have access to your name, contact information and domain name for their marketing communications, some of which can be misleading. So, please read the small print.
To avoid third parties from contacting you to sell or market their products and services, Office Live Small Business provides Private Registration free with every new customer domain name purchased and registered through Microsoft Office Live. This will hide the personal registration and contact information from public view within the ICANN database.
One of the advantages of having domain name private registration is to avoid being contacted by third parties who can use information they find about you in the "Whois" directory. For example, there are "domain registration" companies who send out formal domain name expiration notices/invoices to Office Live Small Business customers on your renewal anniversaries in an attempt to get you to transfer/renew your domain name. They often charge a much higher annual renewal fee. While annoying and deceptive, this act is not illegal. Ensure that you are not hooked into paying these inflated amounts. Having a private registration is one way to avoid that kind of solicitation.
Signing in
Just go to
Office Live Small Business and click the
Sign in icon in the upper-right area of the page. You will be prompted for your Windows Live ID and password. Your Windows Live ID is the e-mail address that you used to sign up for Office Live Small Business. Once you have correctly entered these, your Office Live Home displays. From here you can access all the features in your account.
When you signed up for Office Live Small Business, you either had an existing Windows Live ID or you created one during the sign-up process. The Windows Live ID service is designed to manage identity and trust among various Microsoft sites. Office Live Small Business is one of these.
To reset your password, go to
Windows Live Account and on the summary page, under your user ID, you will see
Password reset information. Follow the instructions to reset your password and your security question and answer.
To change any of your registration information (correct a birthday, or change your marital status, for example), go to
Windows Live Account and on the summary page, under your user ID, click
Registered information. To change personal information, such as your phone number, click
Billing information. After you have finished editing your information, click
Save.
E-mail
With Office Live Small Business, you can create up to 100 e-mail accounts and manage calendars, contacts and tasks from virtually any Web browser.
Having a personalized address that matches your business domain name (for example, jsmith@northwindtraders.com) gives your company a much more professional image when you communicate with customers and colleagues. Microsoft Office Live provides e-mail services using your domain name and eliminates the need for you to own and maintain an in-house mail server on use an Internet Service Provider to handle your e-mail.
Yes. You can easily access your e-mail and update your calendar, contacts, and tasks from your own computer or almost any Internet-connected computer that uses Internet Explorer 6.0 or later.
With the
Microsoft Outlook Connector customers can access and manage e-mail, contacts, calendar, and tasks using their own copy of Microsoft Office Outlook.
Security and privacy
No one technique offers complete protection against computer viruses. You can, however, take several steps to protect yourself from viruses carried by e-mail:
- Know where your e-mail is coming from. Be especially careful of e-mail from unknown sources.
- Be careful of attachments to your e-mail. Be especially careful of executable attachments that end in .exe, .pif, or .vbs, among others, and never open attachments that you aren't completely sure about.
- Make sure your e-mail software is NOT set up to automatically download or install e-mail attachments.
- E-mail addresses can be spoofed, which means they can appear to be sent from a different address than they really came from. Don't automatically trust e-mail from any address you recognize.
- Install virus scanning software on your computer, and keep it updated.
- Make sure your computer's operating system is up to date with the latest security upgrades.
- And in case the worst happens and your computer is infected, make sure you have backups of your data files.
When highly confidential information (such as a credit card number or password) is transmitted over the Internet, Microsoft protects it through the use of encryption, such as the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol. Encryption is the process of encoding data to prevent unauthorized access, especially during transmission. Encryption is usually based on one or more keys, or codes, that are essential for decoding, or returning the data to readable form.
Microsoft follows the
Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) when developing software. The process entails a series of security-focused activities and deliverables during each phase of Microsoft's software development process, including the development of threat models during software design, the use of code-scanning tools during implementation, conducting code reviews, and testing security during a focused "security push". Before software can be released, it must undergo a final security review by an independent development team. Software that has undergone the SDL experiences a significantly reduced rate of security vulnerabilities being discovered.
The data you maintain on Office Live Small Business is stored in computer systems with limited access that are located in controlled facilities. Additionally, the
Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), a worldwide security response system, was created to protect Microsoft customers from vulnerabilities in Microsoft software. The MSRC seeks information about software vulnerabilities, monitors for evidence of security incidents, and then responds quickly and aggressively to help protect customers from security threats when they emerge.
Access to workspaces and business applications can be controlled by the administrator of the site, that is, the person who subscribes to the Office Live Small Business account. Administrators can grant access to users through specific levels of permission, such as Reader, Editor, and Administrator. These permission levels are set through the Account Settings area. The Administrator has full access to set user permissions and to add, modify, and delete information; Editors have full access to add, modify, and delete information; Readers have read-only access to information.
Administration and support
Here’s a summary of our support options:
Support:
Office Live Small Business | U.S. |
| Phone (Toll free) – Included for first 30 days. Thereafter, available for qualifying customers** | Yes |
| Phone (Local) – Included for first 30 days. Thereafter, available for qualifying customers** | No |
| E-mail | Yes |
| Online Help and FAQ | Yes |
| Resource Center | Yes |
| Community forums | Yes |
All Office Live Small Business accounts come with free phone support during the first 30 days. After 30 days, all customers will be entitled to online help, e-mail support, resource center, and communities (where available).
**To qualify for phone support after the introductory 30-day period, an additional subscription to E-Mail Marketing, Premium E-Mail, adManager, or Store Manager is required.
Microsoft uses redundant hardware and software systems to protect against system failures. Redundancy means that Microsoft uses one or more servers on a Web site to perform the same tasks. If one of the servers crashes, another server takes its place. Redundancy ensures that the Web site continues to function and you experience no loss of data if one of the servers stops working.
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