In the previous release of Office Live, we had a deeply hidden and difficult to use feature known as Data Sharing. This feature was designed to allow you to take the data from one of the lists in your password-secured 'business applications' and publish it out to your public-facing web site as a dynamic...

Another great advance in the Winter 08 release of Office Live Small Business is the new Solution Packaging technology. This service allows you to take components off of your public-facing web site & entire business applications, package them together, creating a comprehensive solution to a Small...

Office Live Small Business is designed in large part for the do-it-yourself entrepreneur who needs a web site and collaboration features.  In previous releases, we have been very focused on making it as easy as possible to use, especially around our WYSIWYG Web Site Designer.  And the feedback...

Finally, the floodgates have opened, the embargo has been lifted and I'm free to start blabbing about the latest release of Office Live Small Business. My apologies for the long silence. I'll be working on a few topics in coming days, so stay tuned. In the meantime, start out with this juicy review...

Hey folks, just a quick post to let you know to save the dates and register for the upcoming Office Developer Conference … February 10 - 13, 2008 in San Jose. Previously, our tech evangelist Rob Barker blogged that there will be a track at the ODC that specifically discusses Office Live . So there is...

Hey folks, we've had a little bit of transition on the Office Live developer platform team. Our pals Rohit and Don both moved into new positions, but fortunately we have a new mega-star evangelist on Office Live now, Rob Barker. Check out his blog . He is currently working on a services track for...

Our friends over in the Windows Live ID team have been hard at work lately and have snuck a couple innovations out there without me even noticing it. I know there are some Office Live folks who watch my blog for important developments and this definitely ranks up there. So without further ado... (and...

Yesterday, Microsoft finally started talking about some of the things we've been hush about for most of the year. Number 1 on the list of announcements, from my perspective, is the disclosure of Office Live Workspaces and number 2 is rebranding of the current Microsoft Office Live as Office Live Small...

We've mentioned before the idea of creating a custom application that sits on top of Office Live and is tailored to meet the needs of a specific "vertical" industry such as real estate, construction or retail. Our technical evangelist Rohit Puri has created a new sample called the Inn Manager, which...

Just wanted to drop a line out here to let people know what's up. We're busily working on enhancements for Office Live as you might have guessed, and with the summertime and a kitchen remodel keeping me busy or outdoors, I haven't had much chance to post anything. As you might also guess, we can't really...

Charting is one area that we've wanted to see improve in Office Live. Fortunately, since enough of our platform is opened up, developers can take it upon themselves to do some charting work if they need it for their customers. Darren Johnstone has a blog that covers the work he is doing with Office...

Our platform team has a couple training sessions coming up in the next few weeks that some of you may be interested in participating in. Don Campbell posted more information on his blog , but the short version is that we have 2 sessions, one in Boston June 5th and the other in Silicon Valley on June...

A pretty cool mashup courtesy of our devs Katy and Albert (who you may be familiar with from his screencast videos ). There is a complete writeup coming soon on the Office Live team blog , but since the sample is already posted, I wanted to get the word out to my blog subscribers also. UPDATE: Here's...

Heads up, there is a new code sample that shows you how to use the Windows Live ID Client SDK and the Office Live Discovery Web service to authenticate and talk to Office Live's business applications & workspaces. This can really open up a lot of interesting scenarios for you and your customers....

We've heard before that there are some gaps in the web services that are offered as part of Office Live. For the most part, we allow you to use many of the web services from Windows SharePoint Services v3 on which our business applications & workspaces are built. However, we had to block some of...

Office Live recommends SharePoint Designer as the premier development tool for building composite applications and enhancements to the Office Live Business Applications. I think I've mentioned that here before. Well, our friends on the SPD team have created several useful training videos that you should...

Tara and Rajesh from our team discuss and demo Office Live in the latest .NET show. Check it out! Tara spends quite a bit of time focusing on developer scenarios and gives a nice demo of both web hosting features and the applications platform area that is built on Windows SharePoint Services v3. ...

Our esteemed colleague from the Developer Platform Evangelism team, Don Campbell created what he calls a mind map of Office Live . It's a really neat way to visualize all the pieces that make up the Office Live Application Platform... from the technology itself to the dev guide and forums and blogs that...

Hey folks, it's been awhile since I've posted. We're busily working on some new features for the Office Live application platform for our next release. I'm writing specs, doing screenshots, use case diagrams, etc. etc. etc. Hopefully we'll get some of these features out to you soon, some will be later...

Just heard about the update release of the Windows SharePoint Services v3 SDK and also something called the Workflow Starter Kit. I don't know anything about the Workflow Starter Kit, but it sounds pretty helpful. The big question in my mind is what relevance it will have for Office Live users. I'll...

Just as we were preparing to write a blog post on our team blog about a new code sample, we got scooped by microsoft-watch.com ! Joe Wilcox must have been keeping an eye on the download center and noticed the new Office Live Contact Map sample is now available. The sample mashes up the address information...

In the latest version of Office Live we introduced a new feature called Data Sharing. Essentially this acts as a pipeline between your public web site and web pages and your private site Business Applications on Office Live. You can use Data Sharing to either pipe data into a Bizapp list from a form...

Hey folks, just in case you missed them, our esteemed developer Albert Shen has produced several screencast videos that are now posted on Channel 9. They're quick instructions on how to work with SharePoint Designer to create solutions for Office Live: Office Live with SharePoint Designer - High...

The wait is finally over. The new Office Live version, launched yesterday, is the first release that we are encouraging developers to use as a solution platform. You can create your own custom business applications or workspaces or start from one of our existing applications and extend them for your...

Performance of a web application or page is still a huge pain point for internet users even in the day of pervasive broadband connectivity. Some information came across my desk that says increases as small as a tenth or a half a second in page load time is enough to deter customers from purchasing on...