OfficeLive offers free business features

Remember when you routinely visited computer stores to buy software in shrink-wrapped boxes? It seems so 20th century.

Now, none other than Microsoft is trumpeting a different experience: software-based services delivered “live” over the Internet, with nothing to download or install. With its stake in the Office productivity suite and other programs, Microsoft isn’t about to abandon traditional desktop software.

But Gates & Co. is embracing a strategy to provide online services to consumers and small businesses meant to complement Microsoft software.

Microsoft has a not-fully-polished “beta,” or trial version, of a small-business offering called Office Live aimed at companies with 10 or fewer employees and no dedicated tech staff.

Office Live is a misleading name; you are not getting Web versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint or other Office components. Rather, Microsoft is providing customers do-it-yourself tools to build a company Web site, plus features for managing your business. Small businesses often spend hundreds of dollars having other companies design a site for them.

The service comes in three versions, all free until Office Live is formally released in the fall. The basic version, which is advertising-supported, will remain free. Ads show up in the Member Center, the hub for various Office Live tools.

As part of Live Basics, you choose a company domain name such as www.YourFirmName.com. You get up to five e-mail accounts, each with a generous 2 gigabytes of storage. You also get those tools to build a Web site that is “hosted” or stored on Microsoft’s servers. And you get reports that clue you in on the traffic the site is generating.

The top tier Office Live Essentials service is expected to cost around $30 a month and won’t be ad-supported. Instead of five e-mail accounts, you get 50; instead of the ability to transfer 10GB of data per month, you can transfer 25GB; and instead of 30 megabytes of storage on the Web site, you get 50MB.

Microsoft says it will increase those puny capacities before the service goes final, because it may not take long before a small company runs out of room. For now, you can bolster the storage of your site in 50MB increments for $1.95 per month.

Rival Yahoo’s starter small-business hosting service costs $12 a month ($9 for the initial three months) and includes 200 business e-mail accounts, 200GB of data transfer, and 5GB of disk space.

The third version, called Office Live Collaboration, is similar to Essentials, but the assumption is you already have a Web site and business e-mail. It, too, will likely fetch $30 a month. They both provide more than 20 programs for managing customers, employees and projects, and password-protected areas where you can share data with co-workers or customers.

Microsoft is exploring services for the final release to make it easier for you to sell products online or boost the chance that your site will be discovered by search engines. (These may carry a fee.) If you run a small enterprise, Office Live is worth checking out while it’s free. Later, you’ll have to determine if Microsoft is offering enough to keep you around.