Office Live Team

Since Microsoft has added the Header and Footer customization feature I feel compelled to update this post regarding the “Third Party” capabilities. I did some reading within the Office Live documentation on MSDN and I confirmed that when you enable “third party” design tools you are essentially crippling Office Live. It eliminates your ability to build interaction between the back end business applications (contacts etc..) and your public website. Essentially this means that you are converting Office Live into a standard web hosting service. I was under the misguided impression that the “third party” feature enabled me to use SharePoint Designer 2007 to have full SharePoint Server type control.

This does not eliminate the back end application features it simply makes the data unavailable to your public site. Lets face it, the ability to connect your list data to the public site is really the most powerful part of the Office Live offering. I really cant wait to see what happens when they fully unleash live workspaces!

• In order to create your own pages using Frontpage or Sharepoint designer 2007 you need to change the settings under “site actions” which can be found on the “website” page on the right hand side of the page.

• After making this change the default website will be removed and your homepage with display the “under construction” page as seen below:

• If you navigate back to “site actions” you will see that the menu options have changed by providing the ability to revert back to the built-in design tool.

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