Office Live Small Business Gets Server Upgrade

Microsoft is planning to roll out a server upgrade for Office Live Small Business this month, a move that will impact all users and businesses that are leveraging the service. For the upcoming two Sundays starting with next week, the Redmond-based company has planned site downtime in order to accommodate the server upgrade. In this regard, the software giant is also informing business users that are hosting their websites on Office Live Small Business that their websites will be unavailable as the upgrade will progress.

“I wanted to give you advance notice that on September 12 and September 19, we will be upgrading the Microsoft Office Live Small Business servers that host your website. On just one of these days, your public website will be unavailable for up to three hours. During this brief downtime, visitors to your site will see a message alerting them of the outage, and asking them to check back shortly. You will be able to log in to your Office Live Small Business account and access your e-mail during the upgrade, but you will not be able to use the site-management tools,” revealed Annie Akin, a product manager at Microsoft Office Live.

Microsoft’s Tim Kimber noted that Office Live downtime is somewhat of a rarity, but that the work put into kicking up a notch the server infrastructure needs to be done. According to Kimber, Microsoft has prepared and will send emails to all Office Live Small Business customers informing them of the planned outage.

“We have scheduled these updates on a Saturday, generally the lowest day for site traffic, in order to have as little impact on your website as possible,” Akin added. “While these upgrades will improve the performance, reliability, and stability of your website, we apologize in advance for any inconvenience this scheduled maintenance may cause.”