Microsoft Office

From the Microsoft Small Business Office Onlne weblog:

Before you begin
You will need to register for a free PayPal Business Account. If you already have a PayPal personal account, it is easy to upgrade to the business account. Inside the PayPal Business Account, there is a section called Merchant Services. I encourage you to sniff around this portion of the site, because along with the Create Buttons feature, PayPal offers a lot of free and useful e-commerce tools to keep your business running smoothly.

Create a PayPal payment button
PayPal offers not just one, but 5 payment button choices. This is fantastic because you can select a button that is a perfect match for your site’s needs. The buttons to choose from are:

Add to Cart — Use it to sell multiples and variations of an item; it includes inventory tracking.

Buy Now — Designed for single purchases and/or the one-at-a-time customer.

Donate — Similar to the “buy now” single purchase button, but meant for donations.

Buy Gift Certificate — A single-purchase button that allows you to sell gift certificates in amounts you specify.

Subscribe — Great for reoccurring payments like membership dues or subscription fees.

So you can see that the benefits of PayPal buttons are not limited to only e-tailers with products to sell. Take your time deciding which button best suits your site. Be sure to factor in the goals you want to accomplish.

Next, sign in to your Office Live Small Business account. You will need to navigate to your site’s Page Manager and then select the page in which you want to embed the payment button. You can also insert the same payment button site-wide if you want to have a button that acts more like a permanent reminder or as a means of highlighting a special offer.

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Microsoft Campus

Microsoft engineers at the Redmond campus are busy at work with the next iteration of Microsoft Office, tentitively called “Office 2010″.

The hints, innuendos and rumors that have been posted all over the internet (as well as this site) is looking to be more true than not.

The three year wait between Office products is on schedule, according to Ina Fried’s article (link above). The new software is to work with open formerly rival office programs, such as Open Office, Google Docs and the like.

Microsoft is also working to make Office 14 (Office 2010) work with Microsoft phones (and phones in development) and the new up and coming Office Web Aps, that will include Word, Excel and Powerpoint (the Campus’ office mainstay programs). These are to be accessible online, either from their Cloud, including Live Mesh, Windows Live SkyDrive, and Office Live Workspace. Though, I have seen a rumor that Microsoft may combine all their workspaces into one online application. They are already making changes to their Office Live Small Business framework.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft combines Office 14 with web aps, fully compatible with Open Office, Google Docs and not only with Microsoft phones, but the iPhone, as was reported in the above article. As of now, there are compatibility issues with Microsoft Office 2007 and the above said issues, though Office 2007 Word does have a way to save in the 97-03 formats, I wonder if Office 2010 will have a similar venue, to ’save as’ OOo or google doc?

Office Live Workspace

Microsoft Presspass has a great interview with Michael Schultz, Microsoft Office Live Director of Marketing.

There are millions and millions of people around the world using Microsoft Office to help manage their lives. They use the Office products to help schedule carpools, grocery shopping, design party invitations, write reports, just to name a few of the many helpful ideas Microsoft Office helps.

This week, Presspass (of the Microsoft network) spoke to Michael Shultz at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Schultz talked about how using traditional desktop software in conjunction with services such as the upcoming Office Web applications (lightweight, Web-based versions of Office applications expected to be released as part of the next version of Office) could change how consumers work and play, as well as about how parents, students, and home-based businesses can use Office 2007 to make life easier.

In part, here’s what Shultz and Presspass had to say:

Office 2007 can synchronize with Office Web Online to help search for ideas, products and reports. This can help students with school products, businesses with employees online and many other applications. Office Web applications, such as one being developed for Microsoft Office OneNote (becomea MOONie–MicrosOft OneNote!).

Office 2007 can help with tracking your exercise. Says Schulz: “After each daily run, you can post your time to a personal fitness workspace in Office Live Workspace and compare it to previous times. If you share that workspace with your teammates, they’ll get an e-mail every time you update the workspace and will be able to see how you’re doing, and whether they need to step it up.”

Use one of the many online options to share your information: from Office Online, Web based applications, Groove, Infopath, Outlook, for starters. The options are limitless on how you choose to share your information.

Families, businesses, schools and friends can keep in touch instantly with all the available technology Microsoft Office has to offer.

CherylE over on the Office Live Small Business blog has some great tips and hints on how to give advanced design features a try.

You shouldn’t be scared to play with these features. Most of them affect only one Web page at a time, so you can add a new page and play as much as you want without risking any of your existing Web page customizations.

Turn on and find the advanced design features
Let’s take a look at easy ways for you to take advantage of the advanced design features. The only thing you need to do to see all of these features is to activate them in your Office Live Small Business account. This activation is an option in the Site actions drop-down list at the top of Page Manager. For more detailed instructions about activation, see “Activate the advanced design features.”

OK, they’re activated. So where can you find them? They’re sprinkled throughout the Web design tools in new menu options and new tabs in dialog boxes that you’re probably already using.

New design tabs for existing modules
Even without activating the advanced design features, you can create a form on one of your Web pages that collects data for a list in one of your business applications. For example, the owner of the Fourth Coffee site adds a form to collect online orders for pots of coffee to go. For more information about adding a form to a Web page, see “Collect customer information through a Web page.”

Forms are added to a Web page using a form designer module. When you activate the advanced design features, a new tab is added to the Form Designer dialog box. This tab, named Layout, includes several new design options for your form. Don’t get scared away when you first open the tab. The second and third design options require writing XSLT code. The first option, however, is a list of new form layout templates. You can select any one of the four templates to quickly give your form a whole new look by automatically aligning all of the items in the list. To see how a form appears with each of the templates applied, see “Customize a form on a Web page using the advanced design features.”

You can also display a list from one of your business applications on a Web page without using any advanced design features. For example, the owner of the Fourth Coffee site displays the dates and times for concerts at his store on a Web page named Events. For more information about displaying a list to a Web page, see “Display a list to your public Web site.”

Lists are added to a Web page using a list publisher module. When you activate the advanced design features, a new Layout tab is also added for this feature. This tab also allows you to edit XSLT code, but the first option is to apply one of four list layout templates. With a single selection, you can completely change the look of the list on the page. To see how a list appears with each of the templates applied, see “Customize a list on a Web page using the advanced design features.”

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From the Microsoft Office Live Small Business blog: Every morning, it seems, the news brings tidings of another massive layoff. Recently, Citigroup announced plans to lay off more than 50,000 workers. In my industry newsletters, every day at least one big company announces reductions of 10 percent to 20 percent of its work force.

For you, the small-business owner, there is some good news amidst all this bad news. The upside is that an unprecedented supply of skilled, talented, and hard-working employees is up for grabs.

“But I’m not ready to hire anyone right now,” you’re thinking. I don’t blame you. Taking on the responsibility of a new staffer’s payroll, benefits, and training at this time is not the most cost-effective move.

What I am talking about is expanding your business by outsourcing to these workers. With “real” jobs harder and harder to come by, more and more laid-off employees are exploring the freelance world, at least temporarily — and that can be a perfect fit for your business’s needs.

Contracting work to “virtual” workers enables you to meet your company’s demands without tying up cash. You pay only for the services you use. You can pay by the project or by the hour. For far less than the cost of hiring one, you could gain access to the services of a skilled marketer, Web designer, salesperson, CFO, and more.

Where do you find these workers? You don’t necessarily need to spend a lot of money advertising on the big job search sites. Craigslist and elance.com are sites lots of freelancers I know go to look for jobs. You can also check out industry-specific trade association sites or job search sites to see what types of listings they offer.

However, often the best way to find good people is simply to ask your colleagues and friends. Sadly, today everyone knows several people who have been laid off. Put the word out to your circle that you’re looking to freelance such-and-such type of project, and you’re likely to end up with several good candidates.

Sure, this may be only a temporary arrangement if the person you hire ends up finding a full-time job elsewhere. But it can also be a great way to test out how well they fit with your company — and if they’re a match, maybe someday you can offer them a full-time job yourself.

Are you contracting work out to freelancers?

From the Microsoft Office Sharepoint Blog: So here it goes…. I’ll summarize four very different SharePoint offerings, some of them you probably weren’t even aware were based on SharePoint. Just for fun, I’ll call them Mini, Small, Medium, and Large-SharePoint.

Mini-SharePoint

Office Live Workspace, believe it or not, is built on SharePoint but highly customized and simplified for the end user. The idea is simple – create a workspace (which is like a folder), add files to it, then share it with others. Create and share Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, pictures, notes, and custom lists with anyone you want. Or use it to share files between work and home, which is a lot easier than emailing files back and forth.

I’ve created one workspace to share files with colleagues, another workspace to share photos with family, and a third workspace to organize forms and schedules for my vanpool.

Find out more at http://workspace.officelive.com

Small-SharePoint

Office Live Small Business is also built on SharePoint but highly customized with Web features, Web applications, and Web site tools. It includes a Web site, multiple email accounts, and Web applications ideal for the small business with up to 10 employees. The Web site features allow you to create a site without knowing a thing about HTML, Web design, or Web creation software. Use the included Web applications to manage and communicate with employees and customers. For simple file sharing, use the Office Live Workspace included with your account.

My goal this year is to move my mom’s real estate practice to the Web using this service.

Find out more at http://smallbusiness.officelive.com

Medium-SharePoint

SharePoint Online, along with Exchange Online, Communications Online, and Live Meeting make up the new Microsoft Online Services. Rather than installing and maintaining SharePoint Server, SQL Server, Exchange Server, and other server software in your office, just sign up for this business hosting solution and let Microsoft do the heavy IT lifting for you. The service can handle up to 500 individual PC users. Just launch a Web browser, and you have immediate access to your entire business environment.

I would highly recommend this service to any small business that has outgrown Office Live Small Business but is too small to manage a SharePoint deployment.

Find out more at http://www.microsoft.com/online

Large-SharePoint

SharePoint Server (Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server). Last but not least, we have the actual SharePoint software in the box. For the large and enterprise organizations looking to deploy a completely customized and integrated content management solution across the organization, this is what you need. With SharePoint running on your corporate servers, you have complete control over your corporate Intranet, Extranet, and Internet presence, and you can build on the existing collaboration tools, managed business processes, and integration with Microsoft Office client applications.

This is what I use at work every day to communicate with colleagues, collaborate on projects, find critical business data, and actively monitor projects in my department and other departments.

Find out more at http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint

I hope this clarifies the various SharePoint offerings that you or your business can choose from.

Courtesy if CherylIE at MSFT: Want a little more flexibility in designing your Microsoft Office Live Web pages? Curious about how you could put your navigation bar down the right side? Want to replace the standard footer with something fancier?

Customize a header
If you want to customize the header on a page, you can create a new Web part to display the customized content. The easiest way to create this Web part is to add a custom header module to any zone at the top of the page. The custom header module gives you a head start on the Web part by automatically providing the XSLT code needed to include the company information that you added to the standard header.

Using a custom header module gives you complete flexibility in the design of your header; you can edit the XSLT code or replace it completely by pointing to your own file. For more information about the custom header module, see “Add a custom header using the advanced design features.”

Customize a footer
The custom footer module offers a great starting point for a footer Web part. The XSLT code in a custom footer module automatically includes the footer text and links that you chose for the standard footer for your site. Since the module only affects one page, you can edit the text or change a link without affecting the design of your other pages. For more information about adding a custom footer module, see “Add a custom footer using the advanced design features.”

Have your navigation links appear where you want
Would you like to have the navigation links to other pages in your site appear on the right side of the page? You can add a custom navigation module to the zone on the right side of the page. Without editing the XSLT that comes with the module, you have a Web part that displays links to each of the pages that you chose to include in the site-wide navigation bar.

Here, too, you have full control of the font, colors, and images in this new navigation area, because you have full control of the XSLT code. For more information about using a custom navigation module, see “Add custom site navigation using the advanced design features.”

Use your custom designs on other pages
A module is specific to one Web page. To use a custom header, footer, or navigation module on all the pages in your site, you can create a page that includes the module and save the page as a template for use in creating other pages. For more information about saving a page as a template, see “Save a Web page as a template using the advanced design features.”

Even though the custom header, footer, and navigation modules are found in the advanced design category in Office Live Small Business, they are a shortcut design tool that anyone looking for a little more flexibility in designing one page or their entire site can use. For a quick look at the other advanced design features, check out “Introduction to the advanced design features.”

The ClickStream report suggests that a mere 1% of U.S. adult Internet users used Google Docs, while Microsoft Office is in use by more than 50% of adult U.S. Internet users.

On Friday, ClickStream Technologies published a study claiming that “use of free productivity applications such as Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Docs and OpenOffice remains low, while Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Office is in use by over 50% of adult U.S. internet users and shows no signs of declining popularity.”
The 5-year-old technology metrics company reported that a mere 1% of U.S. adult Internet users used Google Docs, based on its study of 2,400 U.S. adult Internet users who agreed to install the company’s data-collection software.

However, the study has come into question this week because two former Microsoft employees are involved in the company that fielded the study.
In 2006, Google published a report claiming that the risk of click fraud is overstated by click-fraud auditing companies. Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google’s business product manager for trust and safety, posted at length about problems with click-fraud statistics from such companies.

On Sunday, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Web spam team, took issue with ClickStream’s findings in a blog post. He suggested that the sample size is low, that the tech-savvy, affluent sort who use Google Docs are probably underrepresented in the ClickStream study because they “are probably less likely to agree to click-monitoring in exchange for cash and prizes,” and that the high proportion of female respondents (more than 65%) doesn’t agree with the overall percentage of female Internet users (52%) and thus suggests sampling errors.

Cutts said that Compete estimated that Google Docs received 4.4 million visitors in September, which he said is slightly less than 2.4% of the U.S. online population.

In a comment on Cutts’ blog, Roy Schestowitz, a doctoral candidate in medical biophysics at Manchester University, free software advocate, and co-editor of BoycottNovell.com, linked to a post on his site that offered an additional explanation for the findings: Two of ClickStream’s employees, CEO and co-founder Cameron Turner and senior research analyst Kim Anderson, used to work at Microsoft.

By Skip: If you want lots of visitors to your Web site, it helps to have lots of links to your Web site. Link exchanges — sometimes called reciprocal linking or link swaps — are a popular way to generate more links.

It’s a pretty simple concept. Say I have a veterinary practice and you run a pet store. I ask you to put a link to my vet business site on your pet store site and, in exchange, offer to put a link to your pet store site on my vet business site. This works well because we have complementary, noncompetitive businesses that target the same audience: pet owners.

These reciprocal links help drive traffic from my site to your site and vice versa. They also help us boost our rankings in search engines. This is because — generally speaking — search engines look at the number of links to your site from other sites when listing sites in search results.

How to get started with link exchanges

You have several ways to set up link exchanges.

Do it manually. The upside of this method is that it’s free and you can be assured that your links reside only on sites you deem worthy. The downside is that it takes a lot of work. It typically goes like this: You search the Web to find good sites that are complementary to yours, and then place a link to the site on your site. Next, you send a personalized e-mail to the site’s owner or webmaster asking them to reciprocate. You might also suggest where you think your link should reside on their site, and provide some wording that they could use.
Use link-management software. To avoid the drudgery of reviewing sites to find potential link partners, you can purchase software that does that — and more. iBusinessPromoter is one example, and has a free trial version you can download.
Join an automated link-exchange program. You can pay to have your site automatically included on all the Web sites of program members. A filtering option is typically available to exclude your site from link exchanges you don’t want. Check out LinksMaster.com for an example of this type of program.
Pay someone else to create your links. A number of companies specialize in finding and managing linking services, dramatically minimizing your involvement. LinkStrategy.com is one such service.

From Inside Office Online blog: The October employment news was not good. Another 240,000 people lost their jobs. The unemployment rate reached a 14-year high of 6.5 percent, with 2.8 million more people unemployed than at this time last year. The double whammy of mortgage woes and unemployment is hitting home.

How can we help?

Over the next several months we’ll be rolling out to you as much timely information about job skills as we can. We’ll cover honing your skills so you excel at the job you already have or have in mind, as well as tips for finding and landing the job you want. We’ll serve up everything from resume templates and training courses to clever (sometimes even extreme) job search strategies—including ones we’ve used ourselves.

If you’re hiring, we’ll also provide or point you to resources that can help you make sure you hire the right people the first time.

It won’t all be grim–even in the midst of a job crunch we have to laugh (sometimes ruefully) and celebrate. So we’ll do what we can to keep it light, too.

This will be an ongoing project–one in which many of us here at Office Online will take part. We’ll ask for your feedback as we go, so we can tailor what we deliver to the situations you actually face. I.e., reality.

For starters, what, in your experience, is the most frustrating thing about looking for work?