Business web portal

Microsoft is making a series of changes to its Office Live Small Business service, offering some previously paid-for services free, while adding a new charge for domain name registration after the first year. Domain name registration will continue to be free for the first year. But each subsequent year Microsoft will charge $14.95, though it will add the ability for so-called private registration, where customers can keep their personal information out of the public Whois database. Microsoft said that those who have already signed up for Office Live will continue to have their domain name registered for free "in perpetuity." The company has about 600,000 subscribers for Office Live, which offers, among other things, free e-mail accounts and Web site creation and hosting. The service is tailored to the smallest of businesses that have neither an IT staff nor an outside technology consultant. ***

If this hasn't come through in my blog, I have a sincere respect for Microsoft. I particularly appreciate what it has done with SharePoint. Microsoft has grown a lightweight collaboration portal into $800 million in revenue in just a few short years. It is the fastest-growing product in Microsoft's history. Microsoft being Microsoft, it is sharing the wealth with its partner ecosystem. Yes, Microsoft routinely runs roughshod over its partners but, to be fair, it's hard for a company that size to do much of anything without squashing partners in the process. But in the case of SharePoint, partners will help to drive SharePoint into all sizes of enterprises and into all kinds of applications, according to an article on CMP Channel. ***

Microsoft offers a Web version of Excel. But there's an important difference with hosted spreadsheets from competitors like Google and Zoho: it's tied to SharePoint Server and Office 2007. A Microsoft employee set off a post at TechCrunch when the employee, Tod Hilton, wrote a blog talking about his plans to start working on the Excel Services team. Hilton wrote that a future product would compete with online spreadsheets like DabbleDB, Zoho, and Google Spreadsheets. He later removed those comparisons from his blog post. In the course of posting and unposting, Hilton shined light on a product that few people in the media have picked up on called ***