14 DAY TRIAL // Five weeks from today, Microsoft’s Office Live Small Business will be no more. The Redmond-based software giant will discontinue it on April 30th, 2012, and will shut down all access to the service the very next day.
Microsoft announced a while ago that it planned to discontinue the Office Live Small Business (OLSB) offering, and is currently nearing the said deadline.
All OLSB users interested in keeping their websites and content will have to make a decision on what they will be doing moving on.
Starting with May 1st, 2012, all access to OLSB service and public websites will be shut down, and customers will have to make the transition to a new provider. One option is Office 365, Microsoft announced.
“Microsoft Office 365 replaces OLSB as the comprehensive Microsoft productivity service for small businesses. The OLSB service will continue to run as it does today through April 30, 2012,” Microsoft says.
“As a valued OLSB customer, you will be offered 6 months free of Office 365 for professionals and small business and Office Professional Plus service. Please note that the OLSB service will be discontinued on May 1, 2012. All access to the OLSB service and public web sites will end on that date.”
OLSB customers can choose the professional and small business plan, P1, when moving to Office 365. Following the aforementioned six months of free service, they will have to pay $6 per user per month for Office 365.
One thing that OLSB users should be aware of is the fact that their websites will have to be manually recreated – all website elements, photos, texts and the like will have to be copy-pasted, as ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley notes in a recent article.
“Office 365 for professionals and small businesses gives you many of the features you value in Office Live Small Business and much more. Office 365 is designed to work with the tools you already know, such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft OneNote, and Microsoft PowerPoint,” Microsoft explains.