A bit of speculation about Office Live here from Daniel McPherson. I must admit I gave up looking into Office Live when I found out you had to be based in the US to register for the beta (I know I could have probably got around that during the registration process but hey!). Interesting to see Daniel thinks it’s using SharePoint Services. Great conclusions as well if it turns out he’s right:
This is great news as it means:
1) It is going to increase the number of “SharePoint” users dramatically
2) The ecosystem supporting and developing for SharePoint is going to grow dramatically
3) Demonstrates the incredible scalability of the SharePoint platform
4) Will improve the product. Experiences gained from running SharePoint as such a service will be fed back into the core product.
Office Live is certainly a nail in the coffin of the webhost companies that have been pimping small hosted SharePoint solutions. Still having used Groove I’d suggest that as the collaboration tool for small companies with little IT infrastructure or hardware budget.
Daniels a top bloke by the way. He came along to the first SharePoint User Group meeting. He travels around a lot fixing SharePoint issues and does his Pint2Share thing on his travels. If you see a Pint2Share where you are make sure you look him up!