With employees located across different offices, with others working part-time, from home or as a consultant, it’s tricky to share information across our workforce. Extending our internal network so it incorporates users outside the firewall, isn’t always practical, so the obvious solution would be to use the Internet to store, share and enable other users to collaborate on our company projects and documentation.

Microsoft Office Live is a free solution that enables an organisation to open their own web presence and then use this as their homepage and as an internal area to share projects, assign tasks, collaborate across workspaces and more.

At a basic level, you get your own homepage, the ability to assign a domain to the space (so, you can have email sent to someone@yourcompany.com) and up to 100 email accounts for your employees, free for the first year.

Taking Office Live one step further, you also have a central store for your office documents, that will offer access to anyone who you want to enable access, whether these are internal employees or external consultants. You can setup version control, so you can see who has made changes to the documents in your central store and revert back to an older version, if required.

Microsoft Office Live is free, but you can also choose to add additional storage, more domain names and email accounts, if required.

Note that the download here simply takes you to the page where you can sign up for the service.