What's the Deal with Microsoft Office Live?

Reader Josh Mattix writes: What do you think about Microsoft Office Live?  It seems like an easy way to get a free domain name.  Am I not reading the fine print?  I haven't seen anything to suggest that I have to pay for it if I use the "Basics."

I've been a little lazy in testing Microsoft Office Live, which launched late last year and has received decent press since. I gave it a spin today, and I'm pleasantly surprised by what I saw.

To correct many misconceptions, Office Live is not a web-based version of Microsoft Office but rather a way to build a website, targeted at small businesses. (No, I wouldn't have called that "Office Live," either, but it's Microsoft, so what can you do?)

With that out of the way, let's take a look at the advantages of Office Live.  You get a real domain name, email, 10GB of bandwidth, 500MB of storage, and all the web-based tools you need to build a pretty crackerjack website. The kicker is the free domain name. Running a business with a blogspot.com or googlepages.com URL isn't really professional. If you're willing to host your site on Microsoft's servers, why not get your URL for free? Setting all of this is completely painless, and it really is free (though Microsoft reserves the right to change prices later). Even a rank novice should have no trouble getting a website launched.

Now for the drawbacks. Naturally, the fine print is extensive. Over 8,000 words of it. But little of it is surprising. Microsoft will run ads on your website, for example. You can't do anything illegal, and the company can kill your account at will, without notice. The biggest bummer: There's no way to actually run a store with the plain Office Live service. You can't set up anything to sell or process payments; you have to use a third party for such services and set that all up yourself. Some people also complain that, even if you use the free version, you have to give Microsoft your credit card number. I think that's a fair exchange for a free domain name. Of course, if you go over your bandwidth limit, you'll have to start paying for premium service ($20 to $40 a month), and naturally, it only works with Internet Explorer and Windows.

Microsoft Office Live is on the whole a really impressive service. It's targeted at business users who need only a simple online presence, but just about anyone could adapt it for their needs. Based on my experiences and others I've read about online, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.

UPDATE - Microsoft sends this correction on the ad issue. Apologies! We do run ads on our internal portal site to help keep the costs down, but there are no ads on our customers public-facing Web site. What we do, is run small-business specific ads on the customers internal page - the page they visit to update and change their Web site. This means that anyone looking at your company's Web site won't see ads, only you and your employees who have access the your Office Live account.