The Sikh Geek

I am a bit of a fan of OfficeLive seeing as it’s built on WSS 3.0, so I was extremely disappointed at my experience of it today. I had told a colleague of mine to set up a new website using OfficeLive Premium for some work we’ll be doing together. He came back to me today and said that he couldn’t create an additional email user. Okay, that’s strange I thought as there’s not much room for user error. I logged in and true enough we were getting the “The mailbox could not be created at this time. Please try again later”. That didn’t seem right to me and then I realised I couldn’t see the default admin user in the Email User’s list although I could access the Inbox. However, when I signed out of Live Mail it threw a Server Application Error. Ooops, not good at all!! Now I knew this was messed up on the server side. So I rang the Support number and a very nice man reset the default password and tried it himself and verified it wasn’t anything to do with my set up, network, firewall, etc - the usual things that support people assume or have on their script to ask. So, he escalated this up to the Server Support Team and told me it might take a couple of days to fix. He asked me what Operating System I was using so I told him Vista Ultimate with IE 7.0. To my surprise he told me that there were issues with OfficeLive and Vista and that I should in future use an alternative OS. Huh? …what like Linux? I thought that but didn’t say it! I asked him if the issues were documented anywhere that he could point me to. Nope, I should go and Live Search it - for heaven’s sake I thought! What issue could there be with using Vista and OfficeLive when it came to making System Changes from the Member Center, it’s just being accessed via a browser???

The reply I got from my colleague was that he hoped this didn’t turn into a nightmare like he’d recently had with 1and1. Doh!! Thanks Microsoft, there I was saying what a great system this was and how Microsoft knew how to run Enterprise systems and the first thing I get is a “Server Application Error”!!!

One of the things that intrigued me when I first heard of OfficeLive was that it had a developer framework. I’ve been playing with the Contacts Mashup and trying to understand what’s possible. This Mashup uses a combination of ASP.NET and JavaScript to map contacts in the Business Contact Manager Application in OfficeLive to Virtual Earth which is displayed within OfficeLive. The ASP.NET provides the layout of the windows and your restricted as to what can be executed on the server side. The JavaScript makes web services calls to the OfficeLive Business Contact Manager and to Virtual Earth to bring the two together. The ability to make web services calls is a very powerful feature and means you can interact with anything that is exposed as a web service. One example of this might be integrating OfficeLive with Amazon’s S3 web services for things like E-Commerce and Storage. The advantage of Amazon’s web services is that you only pay for what you use and the services are massivly scalable. These are only thoughts, I’ve not tried this but it should be feasible through standard REST and SOAP interfaces.

Another powerful feature of OfficeLive is the ability to develop client applications which can authenticate to your site using Windows LiveID and then interact with the Sharepoint Lists etc. The only thing is that information is a little thin on the ground and developing using Visual Studio 2005 is basically using it as nothing more than an editor. I wonder if Orcas will allow you to create an “OfficeLive” project? Also, how do you effectively debug your system because you have to keep uploading your files to OfficeLive and running them and seeing what errors appear. There’s no deployment mechanism for applications such as the Contact Mashup.

What’s really nice is that you can use Sharepoint Designer 2007 to develop new applications based on Sharepoint Lists/Workspaces and workflow.

So, OfficeLive is in no way a “noddy” framework and is quite powerful being based on Sharepoint Services v3.0. I think it’s missing two major features at the moment which are creating RSS feeds and configuring Blogs within the framework. I’m sure the platform will develop over time. For the Premium Service at £22.99 per month for 20 users, this is amazing value!! Could you run your business on this? I cannot see why not! 

P.S. OfficeLive in the UK comes out of beta on 23rd May 2007.

On the Premium Office Live account you get 2 GB per mailbox, 2 GB website space and 1 GB for Workspaces. Now how much would you guess at for extra storage? Well it’s going to cost £2.99 per month for ….1 GB - well er no! …more like 100 MB! So, for an extra 1 GB of Workspace storage it’s going to be about £30 per month. It’s not going to cost Microsoft a whole lot of extra money to provide additional storage. Surely it should be about £2.99 or even £4.99 for an extra 1 GB of space? That’s what Google would do and probably will do!

Microsoft kindly gave us access to a Premium Office Live account after a great suggestion by Susanne to Microsoft. So, here is our initial effort for AMITRO. My initial thoughts are that we can really make good use of it. I’m spent some time this weekend looking at some aspects of it and has some great features. Our site will remain a work in progress for a while, so expect things to change and develop over time. The idea is that members of the Group will be given logins to the site which consist of an email account of the form username@amitpro.org. Since Office Live is built on Windows Sharepoint Services v3, then collaboration can be done through the Team Workspaces/Wiki and discussion forums. The look and feel of the site can be modified using Sharepoint Designer 2007 and I’ve opened up the site using this tool and it allows things like Webparts to be added. Another great feature of Office Live is that it can talk to external applications using web services and I’ve added the Contact Map Virtual Earth Mashup, which allows contacts to be added to the Business Contact Manager and then displayed in Virtual Earth. This would be really useful to see where each member is located for things like providing geographical support. So it terms of enhancement I’d like to investigate the ability to register for events online which should be feasible as you can add in web parts and ASP.NET code.

That’s the good stuff but there seems to be some limitations which are either real limitations or just my lack of knowledge at this point. There isn’t the ability to add a blog, eventhough WSS v3 supports this. I ended up using the Feedburner suggestion from the OfficeLive Blog but it’s not really what I’m looking for. There doesn’t seem to be a way of adding RSS feeds (through the templates), this can probably be done through code?

I’d be interested to hear from other people who’ve played around with this stuff as developer information is rather thin on the ground at the moment. If I get anything useful in terms of code, I’d be happy to share it with people.

UPDATE

• You can’t use Sharepoint Designer 2007 to change a public web site (the master page can’t be modified)
• RSS feeds can only be displayed but not created
• Server side code can’t be executed