Microsoft Office Live – what a mess!

We had a call from a former customer of Microsoft Office Live who was having problems recovering their website since Microsoft shut down the service earlier this year.

It took a while to understand what they had done but basically Microsoft wanted to change Office Live customers and “suggest” they switch over to their new service, Office 365, but unfortunately it would cost a bit more…£4.25 per user, per month! Not so bad if you only have one user but how about 10? Compared with other services such as Google Apps or a basic hosting account for around £60 to £100 a year that seems a bit much!

Having finally worked out where Microsoft moved their domain name and how their email is still running, we’re now helping them to move email to Google Apps for Business (free for up to 10 users!), and we’ll be hosting the website (which we managed to recover from Microsoft) temporarily while they’re busy working on projects and next year we’ll look into giving it a makeover and sort out permanent hosting.

For anyone else struggling with Office Live websites that have been shutdown let us know and we’ll be happy to help you too!