Microsoft Office Live Beta debut and NASCAR

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Have you ever noticed that drug dealers and software developers both refer to their clients as "users"....



What do NASCAR and cached DataSets have in common?

According to old friend Chris Falter, it's a predilection for race conditions. Or, to use the NASCAR analogy, as the number of cars on the race track increase, the probability of wrecks increases dramatically.


And now, the Office Live Debut . . .

http://officelive.microsoft.com/

I got an invite so I went on and looked around. Looks pretty interesting. Just snagged a domain name for free and started playing around with the web site designer.

This could be useful for small businesses, Developers could use it as a tool to get in the door if Microsoft supports it right. We'll see what happens.

The BETA includes:


  1. A company domain name»

  2. A hosted Web site with 30 MB of storage

  3. Five free e-mail accounts with 2 GB of storage each

  4. Basic Web analysis tools




The Basics package is really just a website deal, indistinguishable from the thousands of others already in the marketplace. Collaboration looks like SharePoint rolled out once again as a shared service. And Essentials is the other two combined, with FrontPage access. It has reporting and other little trinkets thrown in. Yeesh! I have to wonder if Microsoft really believes this offering is going to make a difference in the marketplace? I mean, sure it's easy to set up -- "Website and presence for dummies 101" -- but where's the extensibility? How am I gonna hook it into a Database?


N.B. - 4/12/2006:
Well! The first thing I found out is that I can't upload an image from behind a corporate firewall!

I see the domain is hooked up, peterbromberg.net Maybe when I get more time, I'll do something with it. I can see this might have some
value for a small business. But I'd like to see more of a hookup for developers so they could "do stuff" for an Office Live client and earn fees.

Incidentally, if you have more interest in this, I see that Paul Thurrott has a nice writeup on it with a bit more of the history lesson.


Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

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