Improved Microsoft Office Live Small Business Services

I’ve been playing around with my website I setup on Microsoft Office Live’s Small Business Services website. I initially just set it up to test the service and learn a little bit about it, now I’m thinking I may actually start using the domain for somewhat of a client portal of my own.

I received a flyer in the mail recently reminding me of the services available to me, but also letting me know that many of the services that were “premium” are now free.

• Advanced web site design: if it’s web based still no use to me, if it’s web space I can upload my own ASP.NET pages to, then that will be perfect!)
• Contact Manager (NOW FREE): this could really be a benefit to me if I use it efficiently.
• Business Applications (NOW FREE): not sure about this, will have to investigate it further
• E-mail Marketing (NEW): At this point it’s not something I’m going to pay to use for what I can produce all that I need with free methods.
• Store Manager (NEW): I do have more clients wanting to sell products on the web, so this could be interesting.
• adManager: Again, not something I’ve needed to take too much advantage of at this point.

Are you using Microsoft Office Live’s Small Business Services? Do you host your website through them? I’d love to hear how you’re using it and see what you’ve got available online through their services. Let me know in the comments.